Break Out the Shovel
Dig up chests, fight through stages and challenge other players in treasure-seeking adventure Bonehead, an RPG game developed by Honk Kong Touda. On this digging journey you play as a skeleton, whose main task is to unearth valuable treasures and enhance your strength through your newly found spoils. Unfortunately, digging for buried riches has never been more monotonous. Instead of a skeleton in search of vast treasures, you will feel more like a mindless zombie while playing Bonehead.
In Bonehead, a significant portion of the gameplay involves observing your character excavating chests from graves. These chests provide equipment that enhances your character’s HP, ATK, SPD and DEF. Additionally, gear may include beneficial effects like dodge, granting you a percentage chance to evade enemy attacks. However, you don’t just get an endless stream of chests to open, they need to be earned. Completing tasks is one of the main sources of chests. Tasks will ask you to dig up a number of chests or complete a certain stage to receive a reward. Players can also obtain chests through daily sign-in bonuses or by engaging with the numerous lottery systems scattered throughout Bonehead.
Aesthetic Advancement
The main screen is where the digging takes place. The user interface is crowded, as the top half of the screen shows all your gear, and the bottom has multiple tabs for the different features. Leaving only a fraction of the screen to see your character, and even that has desktop style icons on it for all the various microtransactions and sign in reward pages. One of the things Bonehead does well is offer a good sense of visual progression for your character. As you equip stronger gear it generally becomes much better looking. Making the player feel rewarded for obtaining higher level equipment.
When you aren’t digging for chests and upgrading your gear you will be battling. Bonehead offers a few different ways for you to engage the enemy, including completing Stages, fighting in the Cave and doing PvP battles in the Arena. Stages offer increasingly difficult fights that reward you with a handful of chests for winning. The Cave offers boss fights. These bosses are indistinguishable from the types of enemies you face in Stages, but you do get a few hundred chests for beating them. The PvP Arena pits you against another player’s character. You need to use Challenge Scrolls to access this feature, which you occasionally get through opening chests. The rewards for the PvP Arena vary. But usually, you end up with items that you can use to upgrade your gear. All the different ways to battle play out in the same way. Your character is confined to a one-on-one clash with the adversary, leaving you as a mere spectator.
RNG Battles
Battles are heavily influenced by random chance, leaving you at the mercy of luck. You sit there hoping that you land a critical hit or dodge the enemies attack which might help to tip the scales in your favor. Many times, the fights can go either way. Sometimes, you’ll endure constant stunning, unable to land a single hit, while other times, you’ll consistently deliver critical hits, leaving the enemy looking completely outmatched. The randomness can really detract from all the effort you put into developing your character.
Bonehead ultimately suffers from a quantity over quality issue. On the surface, there appears to be many different features but when you boil it all down, you end up with a shallow experience that only has three or four aspects to explore. Sometimes story and narrative elements can make up for lackluster gameplay, but Bonehead has none. Throwing in a predatory monetization model that asks the player to spend money every time they use up a resource feels exhausting. There just are not enough redeeming features to make up for the uninspiring and disjointed experience.
