Ritual: Crown of Horns – Review (PC)

By Phil Neyman Last updated Nov 25, 2019

Ritual: Crown of Horns may be one of the most frustrating games you’ll play this year. Not because it’s a bad game necessarily, but because with a little more polish it could have been a great game.

Set in the wild west, you play as Daniel Goodchild, an ex-patriot that is now fighting against the government he once served when he learns from a witch that things are not as they seem. While on a mission he is badly wounded, knocking on death’s door when the witch offers him an opportunity for vengeance by giving him new life. Since the alternative is death, Goodchild accepts the offer and is off on an adventure, tasked with protecting the witch and carrying out missions for his new cause.

Ritual: Crown of Horns is a top down, run-and-gun, hoard mode shooter for lack of a better classification. Each mission that you go on has you taking out waves and waves of enemies while the witch performs her ritual. Each level has a time limit and you must protect her at all costs. Making sure she finishes the ritual and brings demise to all remaining foes is your only goal.

Advertisements

Along the way you’ll rescue and pair up with a complete cast of characters that will help you on the way. After each mission you’ll return to the hub and prepare for your next fight. As you complete missions you’ll be awarded horns that you can use to upgrade and buy weapons, spells, and other items. The biggest problem with this is how hard it is to obtain horns which are needed to power up your character with the appropriate abilities that you’ll need in order to complete missions. The difficulty is brutal and the reward is fairly shallow. This ends up putting you in an endless loop of failing missions that you need to complete in order to earn enough horns to power up Goodchild in order to beat the missions. It’s because of this that the game suffers the most.

There is a nice variety of enemies in the game, but some are just nearly impossible to defeat without taking substantial damage.

Gameplay is fun and, unlike most run and gun shooters, precision really is king here. You’ll need to aim your shots perfectly and use your spell at just the right time. If not, you and the witch will be overrun in no time. You’ll have a variety of weapons including your single shot pistol (great for head shots), shotgun (good for taking out multiple baddies at once), and your crossbow (which is one shot, one kill). These weapons and more will be your tools used to keep the witch safe and sound while she carries out her part of the deal. You earn new weapons after completing certain missions but, much like the horns, these missions are nearly impossible at times – making them pretty tough to obtain.

The earlier missions are a ton of fun and the controls feel really great. Unfortunately, as the difficulty ramps up the fun factor goes way down. Though aiming and shooting feel tight, but the number of enemies that appear at once make even the best shooters feel under-powered and unprepared.

There is some fun to be had here but the increasingly brutal difficulty makes this game hard to recommend to anyone other than someone dead set on trying every twin stick shooter out there.