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And, overall, the Knight Witch is a good game in just about every way. But, there are a few small things that, if addressed in some capacity, could easily propel this title from ‘good’ to ‘great’.
8 The Game Needs To Be Faster
First and foremost, the game needs to be faster. Anyone familiar with the Metroidvania, roguelike, or shoot ’em up genres can vouch that this game is just a tad slow.
It’s not obscenely slow or anything like that, but for a game that’s meant to at least partially homage a few of the all-time shoot ’em up classics, Reyna doesn’t fly all too fast, and neither do the bullets flying at her.
7 Give Reyna A Dash At The Start
This a very small nitpick, but in the Knight Witch’s prologue, players take control of Robyn, who the anime-esque story paints as the protagonist of all protagonists. And, Robyn has a dash, a very good one in fact, that allows her to dodge through projectiles and move freely amidst a sea of enemy bullets. Then, players take control of Reyna, and…the dash is gone. Now it’s not all too long until they unlock one for her too, but it takes at least a few hours, and the gameplay while she’s missing one feels tedious at best.
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So, while the dash upgrade is a big part of the puzzle-solving in the game’s second zone, there’s no reason that Super Mega Team couldn’t just have it unlocked from the start. This wouldn’t negatively impact the puzzles in the second area all too much, and it would give new players a bit of a safety net while getting used to the combat.
6 More General Accessibility Options
While the Knight Witch has all the basic options there such as different volume sliders, V-sync, resolution, and even a way to disable the default crosshair, it’s still pretty barebones. As far as “accessibility” goes there’s not much here to make the game easily playable for everyone.
Granted, the Cheat system does sort of fill the same role in some ways, but only some. There aren’t any UI options, alternate control options, or even detailed graphic options. Again, this is a very small complaint, but it does make a difference.
5 The Current UI Is Difficult To Keep Track Of
Let’s be honest, anyone who has put more than a few hours into the Knight Witch has long since stopped trying to keep track of their Spell Card rotation. In this game, players unlock a variety of Spell Cards they ’equip’ to themselves in a specific order. But, because the UI, in general, is pretty confusing, it’s hard to keep track of what card is coming up next. Whether it’s the fact that there are 3 cards available at a time (which makes following the rotation difficult), the mix of roman numerals and numbers, or just the placement of the UI in general, it’s just not the most user-friendly system.
Things would be easier to read if parts of the UI were visible above or below Reyna herself. Use blue circles to represent her current mana, general icons for the spells, and hearts above her head to keep track of HP. This way, players wouldn’t have to be constantly looking to the upper-left and then bottom-right of the screen while also dodging hundreds of bullets in order to keep track of their HP, Mana, and current Spells.
4 Ambushes In The Late Game Don’t Feel Rewarding
The Ambush system is pretty neat in the Knight Witch. Basically, there are certain rooms all over the variety of maps that ’lock’ when Reyna enters them and will then continuously spawn enemies until she’s defeated enough to deplete the Ambush HP bar at the bottom of the screen. Frankly, it functions very similarly to combat encounters in character action games like Devil May Cry or Bayonetta.
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But, as the game continues, these Ambushes get more and more difficult in a way that just doesn’t feel rewarding. By the end of the game, players are just trying to actually catch down the enemies in Ambushes more than fight against them, making these rooms feel like more of a chore than a fun challenge.
3 Map Open & Close Needs To Be The Same Input
Probably the smallest complaint on here, but one that players will constantly feel the effects of through the course of their time with the Knight Witch. As with any Metroidvania, the Knight Witch has a variety of maps players explore with locked doors, items, and areas that require a lot of backtracking.
So, to keep track of where they’re going and what they’ve already explored, players will be opening and closing the map constantly. The only problem is, the input to open the map isn’t the same as the one to close it. On a controller, this isn’t as bad, but on PC players need to move their hand up and press Escape each and every time they back out of the map. Thankfully, it’s hard to imagine a fix for this taking anything more than an hour’s worth of work at most.
2 Outline Enemies, Reyna, & Projectiles Options
Probably our biggest personal complaint, a lot of the visuals in the Knight Witch can easily blend together when the player is focusing during combat. Half of Reyna’s projectiles are red, the enemy projectiles are red, her outfit is red, and the separation between the foreground, background, and interactable elements of Dungeonidas isn’t crystal clear. Combine all this, and it’s very easy for players to take hits they just couldn’t visually process in time.
To fix this, all Super Mega Team would have to do is add options for different outlines around Reyna, enemies, or even projectiles. Or, at the very least, give players an option to make Reyna’s projectiles a bit more transparent so that players can focus on dodging enemy bullets over watching their own.
1 Increase To Move Speed Outside Of Combat & Puzzles
And lastly, let’s talk a bit more about speed in the Knight Witch. Now the fact that the general gameplay loop of the Knight Witch can be slow has already been mentioned. But, this is more talking about how slow it is to get around the map outside of combat. Reyna just flies pretty slowly, and this can make backtracking feel very tiresome. Of course, if the developers just upped her base speed, this would likely cause all sorts of balance issues for both the combat and the puzzle sections of the game.
Instead, they could simply just adjust her move speed outside of combat, and if players are in what the game would define as a ‘puzzle room’ or in combat, they could slow her down so that no balance adjustments would need to be made. The request isn’t to adjust the game to be so fast it’s basically built for speedrunning, but just to speed it up a tad when moving around the map specifically so that backtracking doesn’t feel tedious.
The Knight Witch was released on November 29, 2022, and is available on PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
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