Ritual: Crown of Horns is a game with a lot of spirit, great music, and fun lore, but lacks significantly in variation of play. Unless you love wave shooters and horde modes, you’ll quickly run out of patience with this game.

By Scuttle Gamez

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The Game:

Ritual: Crown of Horns is essentially a wave shooter. You play as a legendary former lawman brought down by cultists and evil. The witch you were sent to kill turns out to be your salvation. She brings you back from the dead, infuses your body with new power and abilities, and tells you the what’s what of the world at large.

Turns out that roughly half the good old US of A are cultists and evil doers, perverting the souls of good folk to fuel the county at large and killing those behind closed doors who challenge them

You were a lawman, one of the best. Now it’s time to rise and hunt once more.

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Ritual plays as a pretty standard top-down wave shooter. Each place you travel to has a central zone to protect, a timer on top of the page, and enemies of varying types closing in on all sides. Survive and defend till the timer hits zero and you win and progress to the next zone, rinse and repeat.

Mixing up play are different guns, upgrades, gear, spells, and modifiers to play. There are challenge modes to conquer, play styles to toy around with, and souls to collect.

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Speaking of souls, each enemy you kill drops their soul for you to consume. Souls power your abilities, such as dashing, and dashing lets you move around faster than normal and gives a short invincibility frame for moments when a foe gets a tad too close for comfort.

You shoot with left click on a mouse, right click to aim, and if you time your shots right you’ll do higher damage. There are spells to use as well, operated by hitting Q and E when they’re active, and that’s pretty much it.

The Good:

Music, lore, art, and character all breath passion in Ritual: Crown of Horns. This feels like a game made by folks who really loved the world and source material they were pulling from.

Character art is beautiful and mood fitting, the soundtrack is one I could rock out to, and the humor often present in dialogue is well written and had me laughing time to time.

Fans of supernatural westerns will love the vibes this game is bringing. The developers nailed the feel, and deserve kudos for doing so.

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The Mixed:

While character art is great, the on screen models and play is not nearly as pretty. And, it’s not all that consistent in quality either. The witch model and effects for example look pretty good. Your character, the environment, and enemies . . . not so much.

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It’s clear there were some talents artists working on Ritual, but that is not very evident in the models, and that’s a shame to see. This could by a style issue and the route they went was just not my thing, but it feels a lot more to me like budget concerns and / or a lack of experience in 3d modeling.

The Bad:

Wave shooters are boring. Yup, I said it. I know that some people love them and they might not get as bored quite as quickly, but even then I feel there is a serious lack of innovation at play here.

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Part of my problem with the lack of game play variance is the price being charged for this game. It’s just, well, lacking in content. There are a lot of other games for cheaper that bring a whole lot more bang for your buck.

At the end of the day, I got bored playing Ritual: Crown of Horns, and that’s pretty much the worst thing a game can be, boring.

The Verdict:

I see some passion and love for this game in the non-play elements on display, but a lack of that same quality, and little variation, kills this title for me.

I loved the lore, the humor was great, and I enjoyed the music, but the game play was boring. Unless you are a hardcore fan of wave shooters, give this one a pass.