The_Witcher_Crimson_Trail

The Witcher is based on a popular Polish sword and sorcery series that has made it's way onto PC's and finally onto mobiles. The second part of the title, the Crimson Trail I guess refers to the fact that there's a lot of killing in the game, and believe me, it's quite bloody.

You play the role of the Witcher, a renowned monster-slayer-for-hire and master swordsman with superhuman strength and reflexes. Makes slaying a whole castle full of monsters sound quite easy. Well, it certainly starts off that way.

The Witcher has some really nice 2D graphics that grab the attention straight away. There is a lot of detail on the characters and the backgrounds and the animation is first class. In fact, this reminded me a lot of the original batch of Gameloft games back in the day with titles like Medieval Combat. A few minutes in and it's clear the graphics are one of the key selling points of the game. Sound isn't bad, with an eerie tune and vibration whenever an enemy is near, but after a while there are so many enemies that the phone is vibrating a lot.

The controls are well thought out, the game boasts a combo system in addition to casting magic. Like all good mobile games with combos, you have to press a series of directions and the more powerful you get the more moves and choices you have in the combos. Pull off one and it's a fair bet your enemy has been reduced to a pool of blood. There are two types of enemies, usual monsters and the undead so you have two types of swords. Switching between them can be a pain, but on the early levels at least you only have to work out which one to use for the whole level.

In addition to the fighting moves you can cast magic by pressing the left soft key. The * button will change what magic you are using from a force push, immobilisation, fiery hands and invulnerability for a short while. You can upgrade your magic between levels. Finally you can jump around and perform slashes in the air. It's here that I feel the game could be improved as the jump detection was a bit poor. You couldn't jump and catch a ledge by starting directly underneath or even a little to the side, instead you had to jump at it from a bit of a distance. This made life annoying at times, and has currently got me very confused on one specific level.

The Witcher is essentially a hack and slash game where you race through the levels pounding the main button to pull off combos and seeing to the creatures and bosses. There is a plot which seems to be going somewhere and there are even a few choices to make early on (and whether to make potions between levels), but at it's heart you follow the map and keep on slashing.

While improving combos is good and upgrading magic is better, everything gets a little easy up to a point. Some levels have crumbling floors which may cause you to replay the level a few times, but you should be passing the first few levels with ease. Then it gets a little harder, but just concentrate on upgrading that invulnerability and using it before each fight and you should make it through ok.

Then you get to a level where the enemies are continuously reborn and here's where I got stuck. Unfortunately the repetitive nature of the game meant that I only mustered a few tries before it was time to move onto something else. After all, so many games and so little time.

At the end of the day, the Witcher is a very nice looking but rather bog standard hack and slash game. There are a whole load of places it could be improved, but if you are a huge fan of the series, you're not going to care and you're probably going to get this anyway.

Description: Supported Mobile Phone:
Nokia E50, E51, E60, E61, E61i, E62, E65, E90, N71, N72, N73, N75, N76, N77, N80, N81, N81_8gb, N82, N90, N91, N92, N93, N93i, N95, N95_8gb.

Pub Date: Jan 24, 2011
 

Source: www.mobilegamefaqs.com