Skills & Raids

Skills & Raids ends its own store description the way few games do: "Thank you for checking out Skills & Raids. I hope you enjoy the game as much as I enjoyed creating it as a solo developer. 💜 Eddie H.H." That personal voice runs through the whole reception of the game — reviewers who dislike it still tend to soften their criticism, and at least a couple soften it into an actual recommendation. Understanding why requires reading past the 68% positive headline and into the specifics, both of what the game does well and what a repeated, cross-language chorus of players say doesn't work yet.

An extraction RPG with real structure

The pitch has genuine shape to it: three fixed characters, styled as a tank, a DPS and a healer represented by a turtle, wolf and owl, delve into combat areas in real time, extract dropped resources successfully, and spend them crafting gear across Common through Legendary rarity tiers. Enemies occasionally drop their own skills, which can be combined with a character's existing kit to build unusual synergies — a system multiple reviewers call the game's most interesting idea. One review, calling it "an interesting blend of a dark fantasy RPG, an extraction shooter, and auto-battler," reports completing it in about three hours and rolling credits satisfied with what they'd played. A Spanish-language review recommends it outright, specifically framing the industry's current moment as one where "short, small projects made with love" deserve support over bloated live-service releases, and crediting the visible care of a single developer's work.

The complaint that shows up in three languages independently

Set against that goodwill is a specific, mechanical criticism that recurs with striking consistency. A detailed Russian-language review lays it out precisely: "for effective play you need to hit pause on the auto-battle — there's no action queue for characters. You just spam six buttons plus left-click on cooldown, and that's basically the whole game." A Chinese-language review, independently, makes almost the identical point: combat looks like an auto-battler but has no auto-skill-release function, so players are stuck manually clicking skills and targets, meaning "damage, healing or shields can never be maximised, since human input precision can't compete with a program" — concluding the loop delivers neither strategic satisfaction nor mechanical satisfaction. A separate Chinese-language review asks the same question more bluntly: "since it's already auto-battle, why not just add an AI to handle it — the skill hotkeys are too fast to keep up with, it's a total mess." English reviews land on the same friction from a different angle, describing the combat as "pseudo-piano," "super flat," and easy enough that players don't need to track HP or Mana to win. Three languages, independently, converging on the same specific structural complaint is strong evidence this is a real design issue rather than a taste disagreement.

The pattern worth reporting directly

The most unusual thing in this review's sample isn't a complaint about the game at all — it's how some of the game's own reviewers are scoring it. One Chinese-language review opens by noting the developer appears to be Venezuelan, estimates a modest income, and states plainly: "it's hard to give a bad review... let me change it to a positive one instead — but remember to actually read the text, everyone." What follows is a detailed, critical account of the game's flaws: three characters each limited to two skill slots, restrictive movement, a combat structure the reviewer found disappointing relative to the Darkest Dungeon-style extraction game the store page's presentation suggested. A second Chinese review follows the identical pattern — "let's give it a positive review for now" — before spending several sentences explaining exactly why the manual-activation combat system undermines the game's own stated appeal.

This review has no way to independently verify either reviewer's claims about the developer's circumstances, and isn't in a position to judge whether that kind of sympathy scoring is appropriate or not — that's a call each reviewer is making for themselves, transparently, in their own words. It's reported here because it directly affects how the aggregate score should be read: if even a couple of "positive" marks in a sample this size represent goodwill rather than satisfaction, the true quality signal sits somewhat below the 68% headline number, and readers comparing this game's score to others in the library should factor that in.

What's actually being fixed

To the developer's credit, the response to launch feedback has been fast and substantial. Eight separate updates landed in Skills & Raids' first nine days, and 2 August brought a "Big Skill Rework Update" — the kind of significant, named change that suggests the core combat complaints above were heard and acted on directly rather than patched around the edges. Whether that rework resolves the action-queue and pacing issues described across the review sample isn't something this review can confirm without a rebuilt combat system to test against the original complaints, but the scale and speed of the response is a genuine point in the developer's favour, distinct from whether the fix has fully landed yet.

Length, bugs, and a couple of loose threads

Reported completion times vary widely — from roughly two hours to seven — which likely reflects how thoroughly different players engage with the crafting and quest systems rather than a contradiction in the reports themselves. One detailed account describes a genuinely serious bug: a boss disappearing mid-encounter, forcing a retreat that then wiped a full set of earned legendary gear, a frustrating way to lose hours of progress to what reads as a scripting error rather than a design choice. A separate, unverified complaint alleges quest text shows signs of being AI-generated and unproofread, citing a high volume of grammar errors; this review cannot confirm authorship or editing process, and reports the allegation only as one reviewer's characterisation.

Final verdict

Skills & Raids is a real, structurally interesting idea — extraction, ability-driven combat, skill synergy building — built with visible care by one developer who is actively patching in response to feedback. The specific, cross-language complaint about its combat design is serious enough, and corroborated widely enough, to weigh heavily against the goodwill the game has clearly earned, and the unusual pattern of sympathy-driven positive reviews in its own sample is worth knowing about before taking its aggregate score at face value.

Worth watching rather than an immediate buy: if the Big Skill Rework Update and whatever follows it genuinely resolve the manual-mashing combat problem multiple languages of reviewers independently describe, this could become a solid short RPG. As it stands, that fix is still unproven against the original complaints.

Players who want ability-driven combat with real tactical depth, sustained across a persistent world rather than a two-to-seven-hour extraction loop, may also want to look at Wanderer.