Skull Horde, the dungeon-crawling, minion-raising autobattler from Bore Blasters devs 8BitSkull, is out today. I like, it, mostly – maybe not as much as Alice B (RPS in peace) appreciated its predecessor’s helicopter-mining, but then there’s enough meat on Skull Horde’s magic bones to distinguish it as more than just another Vampire Survivors reanimation.

As the decapitated head of an expired necromancer, you won’t be doing the monsterslaying yourself: that’s what your growing army of equally gross minions is for. On each stage of a run, you’ll invest in new underlings (with trios of each type combining into single, more powerful units) who’ll automatically start poking pikes and flinging arrows at nearby enemies, while you focus on gathering upgrade-o-loot and trying to find the portal to the next stage before an ever-rising threat level sends in more demons than your skelly squad can handle.

I’m a couple of hours in at the moment, and so far Skull Horde does appear happy to simply be the sum of its influences. Besides the structural similarities to any given Diablo II Necromancer playthrough, the pixelly baddie waves and rapid onslaught of upgrade pickups are pure VampSurvs, and its roguelike tendencies are conventionally presented through heavily randomised runs and the fallback of permanent talent trees for each of its skull variants. Even the heavy metal soundtrack has more than a whiff of Hades to it.

Even if this is familiar ground, mind, there’s plenty of space to tread. Countless minion combinations and pick-and-mix item builds do, genuinely, make each run feel distinct, and the fact that these are your only means of survival – you can’t compensate for a dodgy loadout with any fighting or movement skills of your own – encourages you to engage with, and appreciate, the systems’ depth. I’ve completed or near-missed multiple runs (easier ones can be cleared in under 15 minutes) and I’m still nowhere near to having a favourite item strat or team composition, given how much experimentation there’s left to be done. Except damage-returning Thorn builds, actually. Thorn builds rock.

Not all convention is dull, either. I’m not sure that Skull Horde achieves the same level of brain-massaging SFX dingfests as the true autobattler/autoshooter greats, but it’s still a fast-past, high-output producer of positive feedback pops and chimes, while never taking more than a few seconds to feed you some tasty new upgrade or minion recruit. Oh, Skull Horde, you know just what I like. It’s out now on Steam.