Welcome to our review of The Knight Witch, a gorgeous shoot ’em up with card-based spells to increase your attack power!
Encounter evil foes and choose whether you wield your magic or use your weapons and wits to take them down. With their flight capabilities, superior fighting strength and reality-bending magic, The Knight Witches absolutely control the battlefield!
Shooting or Spell Cards? Why not both? Customize your own unique playstyle, upgrading your Knight abilities for a more fast-paced shmup experience, or strengthen your Witch magic and explore tons of different deckbuilding strategies with over 30 unique spell cards to choose from.
As you journey across Dungeonidas, your heroic deeds and efforts will be seen and discussed by the citizenry. Knight Witches become stronger with gratitude and trust and they can earn it in many different ways, however, not all methods are sincere. Will you do anything to gain popularity, or will you try and stay honest? The choice is in your hands.
The Knight Witch has been lovingly designed as a Metroidvania without barriers; with an intuitive on/off ‘auto-aim’ system, world-altering ‘cheats’ and a focused main story navigation system – you will never get lost and you can tailor the game to your level of play. The Knight Witch is brought to you by a veteran team of developers, with working experience on titles such as RiME, Moonlighter, and Plants VS Zombies.
Having played more than my fair share of Team17 titles, I would say the majority of their titles are more a hit rather than a miss. Sure, they have not all been amazing but the one thing that really shines bright is the visible love for the games they display. Every single game has its own unique feeling and The Knight Witch is no different:
A truly gorgeous hand-drawn game that catches you off guard at first, as the basic intro is not completely representative of the game, more like the intro being the backstory of the actual game. You will see when you play the game, it is also quite intense and not fully representative of the actual fights you will have in the game.
Mind you this is not an easy game, but not hard either, mostly like any shmup game, it all comes down to how well you manage to avoid the incoming attacks and/or enemies and just let the auto-aim do its job. I say auto aim but yes, you can manually aim to make it more like a twin-stick shooter, but I honestly preferred the auto-aim despite their lower attack power. It really makes sense that they get less of an effect because targeted attacks really pack one heck of a punch, it makes fights a lot quicker and maybe I personally love the avoidance strategy more.
During my gameplay, two things always came to mind, there was no ¨safe¨spot on-screen during attacks, which made some fights become calculated death matches and I both loved and passionately hated this part, haha, nothing worse than seeing an attack that you will likely not avoid and make you lose the fight.
At the same time, the restarting is handled so perfectly, you lose the fight, but get to instantly head back into the action. No waiting, just instant gratification or destruction, whichever rocks your fancy.
Is the game any good? Well, I liked The Knight Witch. I would not call it perfect and despite the often disliked part of any Metroidvania, the endless search if you lost your way, it is present in The Knight Witch as well. Though in all honesty, that is more a common “issue” with the genre rather than the game.
In conclusion, The Knight Witch does a lot of things right and with the free demos available on Steam, it at least gives many among us the opportunity to at least play the game and find out if it is something they would like. Me, I just loved the atmosphere and the graphics most of all, the gameplay is not my preferred genre despite doing a good job at it.
