Witch and Hero

Game Info

First thought that came to my mind when downloading the demo of Witch and Hero was, I can’t wait to play an old school Dragon Warrior clone!  My hopes were soon crushed when I noticed the static level design and overly simplistic combat.  I started playing telling myself why am I still playing this…..10 minutes later….20 minutes later….I found myself getting lost in this horribly simple combat scheme and old school grinding tactic style game.  Once I realized every level was literally the same only with different enemy skins, I started to lose my interest.

Witch and Hero has 20 levels that actually will take some time getting through due to the extreme increase in difficulty each level and the heavy amount of replaying levels just for experience and gold.  The leveling up system upgrades your typical health and stats, the gold you use to spend on upgrading your sword (attack), shield (defense), boots (speed) and the Witch’s attacks, fire and wind.  You exchange damage with enemies by merely bumping into them with no swordplay whatsoever and doing more damage from attacking behind them.  You use the analog stick or d-pad to move, L and R move the attack direction of the witch (when not stone) and X toggles the 2 types of the Witch’s magic power.

The game starts out with you “the Hero” and your accomplice “the Witch” heading towards a prize reward for slaying Medusa, but little did they know failure was upon them.  The Witch was turned to stone and the Hero was beaten to a horrible mess, which brings us to the start of the game.  The whole premise is quite interesting story wise, the Hero is after Medusa to slay her once and for all, while dragging the stone Witch along with you every level.  Each stage will have the stone cursed Witch in the center and you will be running around fending off incoming waves of enemies.  As the very low selection of monsters moves in on the screen, they head for the Witch to break her into pieces.  As you may have guessed, you are to protect the Witch from all the enemies as they draw near and once enough have been defeated the music changes and a bigger version of the main monster heads towards the Witch.

I can see this game sucking up many hours of a gamers time only if they can get past the quickly repetitive game design.  There is a demo up on the Nintendo Eshop for you to try out, but the best feature this game has is the ability to transfer your save file from the demo version to the full once purchased.  For $3.99 its not a terrible price, but when you compare it to other stellar indie titles such as Gunman Clive which is $1.99 it holds no ground.