Witch Hunter (PS4)

When I was playing the utterly soulless and incredibly boring Dark Thrones, and truth more awful than the game’s quality hung over me like a shadow. As I realized the emptiness of the endless runner I was currently playing, I knew that beating it would not truly be the end, for I was playing Dark Thrones in a two-pack that came with another endless runner from the same creators. I avoided looking at screenshots to avoid feeding into the building dread before I sat down with the companion game Witch Hunter, hoping against hope that perhaps something had been learned from making Dark Thrones. To my great surprise, Witch Hunter is a better game than Dark Thrones… in the same way that only having nine of your fingers broken is better than breaking all ten.

 

Much like Dark Thrones, Witch Hunter won’t explain to you in-game what the purpose of your endless runner play is, the player needing to consult the PlayStation store page if they want answers. Witch Hunter sees you playing as Wolf, and while Witch Hunter recycles the same end-of-run proclamations that you’re quite the thief for grabbing floating gold coins no one had a claim to, he is actually a renowned monster slayer. Wolf is supposedly on his last monster hunt, aiming to redeem his name for some unspecified reason and cement his legacy, but since this is an endless runner, it’s inevitable that he will eventually fail either do to running right into the monsters who make no effort to attack or the very same boxes and barriers featured in Dark Thrones. Witch Hunter does not even feature witches to hunt, the player instead encountering three different enemies in their path. Two are fairly similar, both humanoid but one is a blue-skinned being with white eyes and the other is an old bearded man with limbs like tree trunks. In an interesting shake-up, there is also a scorpion creature that appears fairly regularly, although since they all stand in place, the difference is only skin deep and you can easily slice through each one of them with a single swipe of your blade.

However, none of these enemies nor the game’s hero or even Witch Hunter’s logo are original designs. All of these elements are cribbed from The Witcher in some shape or form. The logo is a legally distinct take on a Witcher’s medallion. Wolf looks a great deal like Geralt, the hero of that more popular fantasy series having white hair instead of Wolf’s much younger look. The enemies are even direct analogues for specific foes Geralt faces. That scorpion enemy is based on the Endrega, the human with the wooden limbs looks an awful lot like the Spriggan known as Grottore, and while putting some clothes on the blue-skinned man hid his inspiration some, his hair and face are a pretty close ringer for how Drowners are portrayed. With its name even being much closer to its inspiration than Dark Thrones was to Game of Thrones, Witch Hunter feels like the more shameless coypcat of the two and yet, as mentioned, it also seems to have more work put into it than its fellow endless runner.

 

While the backgrounds of Witch Hunter are fairly plain, just an endless foggy forest with no interesting landmarks and very little variation, as Wolf starts running forward on his own you’ll find he encounters threats a fair bit faster than Dark did in Dark Thrones. Wolf’s greater run speed means you have to pay attention a bit to respond to upcoming dangers, the player needing to double jump, slide, or slash based on the obstacle. Witch Hunter can cluster things together a bit so there aren’t overly long stretches of running unopposed, but since the speed never picks up, you quickly adjust and stop feeling any real challenge from the dangers in your way. It’s not hard to keep alive for long periods, especially since healing potions will appear after you take damage but not with the same frequency they did in Dark Thrones at least. Staying alive and gathering gold coins is technically your goal and when you do fall, if you chose not to spend some of your accrued cash on continuing the run, you will get a score based on a mix of gold collected, distance covered, and foes slain. However, since the game is so incredibly easy, high scores feel meaningless and the kind of thing that’s just a time commitment rather than an expression of skill or knowledge.

You can buy upgrades to make the running easier and more productive, but you shouldn’t buy any at first due to Witch Hunter using a trophy system to track your progress. To earn trophies you must complete a set of three tasks, these including actions like collecting a certain amount of gold, dying a certain amount of times, or purchasing specific upgrades, and since you only earn credit for the trophy you’re currently attempting, there’s never any reason to shoot for more than what is asked of you really. The upgrades aren’t that helpful anyway, one being for increasing your health so you can take more hits while the others increase the usefulness of the game’s two power-ups. One power-up makes any coin you grab for a while worth double while the other grants you temporary invincibility, these two power-ups the exact same as the ones from Dark Thrones but with one notable improvement. Now the game will not have any strange glitches if you grab both power-ups and have them active at the same time. In fact, besides enemies sometimes appearing inside pits or the rare moment gold is slow to load in, Witch Hunter has cleaned up most of the glitches from Dark Thrones, Wolf’s runs a much cleaner experience that works more like you’d expect it to.

 

Unfortunately, despite getting down the basics, Witch Hunter still doesn’t have much of an appeal. The trophy tasks are very basic and the hardest ones are usually ones that just hinge on you having a lot of gold, especially since tasks like continuing multiple times in the same run require you to pay higher and higher amounts for the revive each time. You also can’t view your tasks when doing a run and some only register as completed when you’ve finished a run so you can’t even transition into starting the next tasks after performing whatever simple lifeless actions were requested of you, Witch Hunter packing no punch and not even trying to provide anything of interest for the 2 to 3 hours it takes to get all the trophies. It may be a little less mindless than its companion game, but Witch Hunter is still an experience that gets boring in seconds because the only thing you can really do in it is work towards is clearing an essentially meaningless checklist that won’t even ask you to play in interesting ways.

THE VERDICT: Almost identical to the similarly awful Dark Thrones, a change of which fantasy series it is ripping off and a somewhat tidier presentation do not make Witch Hunter worth playing one bit. It is an endless runner where it is far too easy to stay alive, the goals provided to try and change how you play are too plain, and there’s no excitement to be had collecting gold or running a great distance when it’s all just a test of if you can commit the time rather than exhibit any sort of skill. Pretty much the most amusement you can get out of this hollow experience is identifying exactly how it copied Witcher iconography, and even then it’s sad to think some poor soul might have picked up this abysmal experience by mistaking it for a part of a far better franchise.

 

And so, I give Witch Hunter for PlayStation 4…

An ATROCIOUS rating. It is nice to see that the developers at least fixed a few things and tried a bit harder with the enemy and hazard spacing in Witch Hunter compared to Dark Thrones, but at the same time, its existence is actually worse than that of Dark Thrones. Making something as awful as an endless runner with essentially no challenge should have lead to them either retooling the concept entirely or moving onto better ideas, but instead they rehashed the exact same systems as if having fewer power-up glitches was somehow the main thing holding the game back from greatness. There is no understanding of the genre’s appeal on show, the trophies and upgrades are not worth earning, and its more flagrant stealing from a better known franchise for its visuals and theming makes Witch Hunter easier to resent than its companion game. Witch Hunter shows only the thinnest of lessons were learned and hardly the ones that needed to be understood, and while I try to avoid ever directly calling a game developer lazy, it’s hard not to here when there is so little different between this game and Dark Thrones. The two could almost just be reskins of each other if not for minor technical improvements, both games failing to measure up to even the most basic of mobile endless runners because they exhibit a fundamental misunderstanding of how to give the gameplay any sort of depth or difficulty.

 

It’s remarkable that Witch Hunter and Dark Thrones were printed on physical discs and sold as a two-pack. GS2 Games seems to be responsible for the physical edition and they also don’t seem to necessarily have high standards for what they print, but it’s hard to believe this crossed someone’s desk and it made it to the point it would be published. It might just be a lack of standards all around from creators and distributors, but it seems like there aren’t any more games in this exact mold as of yet from Witch Hunter’s creators. Witch Hunter offers so very little that it’s for the best the world moves on and forgets that such a soulless game was ever created.