Sker Ritual | Review

COD Zombies at home? Sign us up!

Győző "FairyEmpire" Baki1 week agoLast Updated: April 26, 2024

0 305 6 minutes read

Maid of Sker was a pretty spooky horror game, huh? What’s next for the franchise, you may ask? Well, in a rather weird twist, it’s a round-based survival shooter in the vein of Call of Duty Zombies, with convoluted objectives, power-ups, and all the things we can expect from that formula. This is Sker Ritual, which we reviewed on Xbox Series X.

We have COD Zombies at home

With the most obvious of jokes out of the way, let’s be perfectly honest here. Sker Ritual is, by all means, a different developer attempting to make a proper round-based Zombies experience, akin to what we’ve seen in Treyarch’s Call of Duty games especially from World At War, all the way to Black Ops 4. With the last handful of games trying rather different things, such as losing the round-based format or moving towards an open-world formula, that classic maze-like ever-expanding Zombies structure is something Activision has not done in quite some years now. In comed developer Wales Interactive, creating a stand-alone title doing just that.

For those unfamiliar with the Zombies mode, it’s a seemingly simple yet extremely deep, varied, sometimes convoluted game mode. Under what appears to be a regular wave-based survival experience, lies a huge series of mysteries, easter eggs, and story beats to unfold, via solving puzzles, finding key items, unlocking new paths, and executing tasks that are often not at all simple to understand. The player gets to earn new weapons and upgrade them, and use all kinds of power-ups to improve their firing rate, movement speed and such – key elements of the game because the players, be it a solo one or a team of up to 4, also need to survive increasingly tough waves of undead enemies while proceeding with the objectives.

Sker Ritual doesn’t try to reinvent the formula, though it has a couple of good ideas which we’ll cover later. The basic formula is virtually the same. The player, or players, get to start from round 1, confined to a small area, which then can be expanded by spending credits to open doors – said cash is earned by mauling the undead. As the map becomes bigger and bigger around us, new objectives become available, weapons can be bought off specific locations on walls, there’s a “weapon loot box” of sorts that assigns us random armaments, we’ve got a terminal to upgrade said weaponry, and even suspiciously familiar colored items on walls to drastically upgrade certain individual stats (such as movement speed or rate of fire).

A tough opponent

The other elephant in the room is perhaps even more obvious: Call of Duty has a marvelously refined shooter module, a gameplay loop that has been iterated upon for so many years now. Indeed, Sker Ritual does not feel as snappy, smooth, and precise as those games – but it’s something even most AAA shooters fail to compete with, so it’s hard to find a fault in that. It has to be said however that, on a controller, the aiming does feel a little off, with the aim acceleration feeling a bit wonky on about any settings, making it hard to aim with pixel-perfect precision. Fortunately, zombies tend to have quite generously large hitboxes and equally large numbers, so laser accuracy isn’t needed. Still, it all feels playable and enjoyable, and with cool WW2-era locales, bizarre enemies, and increasingly wacky weapons, such as mystical swords or cannons spamming bouncing laser projectiles, the power creep and sense of wonder more than makeup for such shortcomings.

There are, of course, variations on the COD Zombies formula in Sker Ritual – usually subtle but welcome changes. My favorite is probably the clarity of objectives. Instead of having to grab seemingly pointless objects and trying them in random locations until something finally happens, or watching a guide on YouTube, Sker Ritual doesn’t hide its main goals. All of the four available maps clearly show what’s the current story/easter egg objective, telling people where to go and more or less what to do. That isn’t to say that there aren’t puzzles to solve, such as a segment with rotating statues with symbols to form a combination, or secret numbers to find only when the dark falls in certain rounds – here, part of the solution needs to be figured out by players. Likewise, when reaching the end of the story missions, players can choose to exit the map or stay and solve advanced easter eggs – this time, with no aid whatsoever. By this point, survival itself is usually quite a tough ask as it should be a pretty advanced round, so sticking around is a huge risk.

Players can also borrow cool powers from a handful of Celtic Gods, allowing them to unleash divine powers to maul down the undead quickly. Newcomers and veterans alike can also find their footing in Sker Ritual, as several different difficulty settings should put everyone at ease. While on the lowest difficulty, I had little trouble completing a map solo, cranking it up the game does become quite punishing, as the waves of enemies become more and more menacing and reviving teammates turns into a hassle. There are also some less noticeable tweaks to the formula as well, such as reviving fallen teammates being tied to specific locations and credits rather than automatically at the end of the round. Perhaps a little bit of endgame balancing would be welcome, as buying the final tiers of weapon upgrades requires a ludicrous amount of cash, with the money income only meaningfully accelerated by the fact that more undead arrive each round.

It works, and then it doesn’t

Sker Ritual certainly won’t win awards for originality, borrowing almost every game design element from another, already vastly popular product. That isn’t to say that the game isn’t good: while it doesn’t look all that impressive technically and the gameplay may not be as marvelously tight and polished as Call of Duty, it’s still a bloody good time to play through the game’s currently available 4 maps, even solo if the difficulty isn’t too high. It’s also true that some objectives are a little tedious and repetitive, especially the ones that require players to stay in a small area while fending off a ludicrous amount of undead. But, in truth, this can be true for COD Zombies as well – though at least there you could make zombies crawl slowly by shooting off their legs, an option that isn’t available in Sker Ritual. And speaking of missing staples, the zombie entry points such as doors and windows that could be barred in Zombies are just staying open here – no repairs here, for better or worse.

A tad more worrying is the state of the online suite, which seems to alternate decent matches with rather messy ones. I don’t know if it’s down to the net code or there’s a quite small player base that has folks connected to players all across the globe, keeping the pings high, but rather often when playing online I see my hits not being registered, movements being wonky and so on. Various objective indicators can also be confusing, and in the case of certain timed optional goals, having the indicator go rogue certainly does not help. Some polishing is certainly needed in the multiplayer department, whereas I’ve found almost no issues when playing offline.

And how is the game’s replayability? 4 giant stages, all with their objectives, goals, and easter eggs, is certainly a very impressive starting point (especially when Activision’s shooters tend to launch with a single map, with often paid DLCs expanding the roster down the line), though once finished with all the objectives on a map there isn’t a leaderboard with scores to beat, which certainly takes the element of competition out. With the game launching at a very inviting price of 20 USD/EUR or so, it’s hard to complain, though there are some paid cosmetic maps and a needlessly grindy battle pass system in place as well, filled to the brim with useless items. Oh well, it is 2024 after all, who doesn’t have a battle pass at this point? Still, even ignoring the last bit, there are easily a couple of dozens of hours of fun to be had at least, with each map offering a standard ending and subsequent secrets and easter eggs to solve, dramatically increasing their playtime for those interested.

That “classic Zombies”-shaped hole in our hearts

With Activision and Treyarch seemingly not wanting or not being able to deliver classic Zombies experiences anymore, Sker Ritual steps in and closely mimics the formula in this brand new round-based survival game against the undead hordes. The maps are wide and fun, objectives are plenty and much more clear than they are in Call of Duty, with various other smart tweaks to make the formula roll smoother. It may not have the visual flair and marvelous shooting of Treyarch’s creations, on top of some annoying connection woes at launch – but since they seemingly abandoned the classic formula, Sker Ritual satisfyingly fills that classic Zombies-shaped hole in our hearts, proposing a fun game, already packed with content and quite cheap. Do we need much more? All in all, it’s a very promising start for Sker Ritual – I’m eager to see patches, balance changes, DLCs or even a sequel tackle the few shortcomings, because, underneath it all, it has all the elements that made us fall in love with the Zombies formula and then some. Bravo!