We love all sorts of games. Sometimes it is hard to cover a game in our traditional review style that’s why we have tidbit-style reviews. These shorter reviews cover games that deserve attention too but simply don’t fit our good, mixed, and bad template. In addition, they get a monthly summary article to give them even more reader attention!
Witch Rise | 70%
Publisher: Ratalaika Games S.L.
Developer: lightUP
Witch Rise has a pretty simple story, an evil witch transformed a pure-hearted girl who was starting to learn magic into a piglet and now she must find four magic staffs to defeat the evil witch. Considering how short the game is, there’s a good enemy variety, as you’ll be fighting spiders, slimes, demons, goblins, and skeletons among other enemies through four different biomes to get all four staffs and fight the evil witch. As expected, defeating enemies will grant you experience, leading to levelling up, which increases either your health or mana.
There are a few secret areas behind breakable walls, those being obviously cracked, but some can still be missable if you don’t pay enough attention, I believe I may have missed at least one of them. Environmental hazards are also present, such as ground spikes, lava columns and lakes, fire traps, and “poison” lakes, they don’t usually pose a great threat, but when combined with enemies they can be deadly.
At first, you’ll only have a sword as a weapon but as you defeat bosses, you’ll be getting the four staffs which are also weapons, each with a different strength, and two of them with different shooting patterns as well, I found myself using mostly two of the four available staffs, as they make the other two redundant. You’ll find chests throughout the map with money, health, and mana, and you can also find these three lying around in plenty of rooms as well as some XP bonuses. Money can be used in shops to buy health, health upgrades, mana, mana upgrades, XP bonuses, and a few other unique items, such as a ring that allows you to move brown boxes.
Two bosses looked the same, apart from their projectiles and colours, and I didn’t find any of the boss fights particularly interesting or unique since all you have to do is keep moving around to not get shot and shoot the bosses. I have played through worse boss fights in other games, but these could’ve had some other factor to make them stand apart from each other and feel more fun to play.
Witch Rise is an incredibly short game that can be completed in less than two hours, it has a cute aesthetic and a soundtrack that doesn’t stand out much, but it does manage to be a fun old-school shooter, reminiscent of the old Doom and Wolfenstein games in terms of it having 3D environments with 2D sprites.
Hi there, I’m Gabriel Colombo (Hence my reviewer name), I live in Brazil and I’ve been gaming since I was around 5 years old. Xbox became my main platform on the Xbox 360 era, before that I had played a bit on PC, Polystation (basically a skinned SNES), PlayStation 1 and 2. I really enjoy to experience immersive worlds, but I also enjoy playing silly games to have a laugh or just have fun.
