The Witcher: Monster Slayer

When Pokémon GO meets the strong storytelling of The Witcher, a very entertaining role-playing-AR-smartphone-game comes out in which you cover a few (kilo-) meters.

Being focused on single player, The Witcher Monster Slayer is an interesting AR experiment and you should certainly give it a try.

The Witcher: Monster Slayer is a respectable product, absolutely up to the standards of CD Projekt RED (despite the development being entrusted to the subsidiary Spokko), and able to give dozens and dozens of hours and walks to the players.

To obtain decent equipment, you either need to grind till you drop unconscious or take a shortcut and buy it with real money. I’m not a fan of such paywalls, but the quests are very well-written and therefore engaging, and after some time I started to enjoy my life as a witcher, especially that I found Monster Slayer’s combat extremely satisfying. [10/2021, p.78]

The Witcher: Monster Slayer is a good take of the overcrowded AR gaming scene.

The pleasant surprise of the summer comes from Poland. Spokko Games takes the Pokémon GO-like formula and makes it its own.

Witcher: Monster Slayer is an app with a big potential that still waits to be properly realized. The gameplay is very engaging, but there needs to be a bigger goal - collecting trophies is cool, questing while walking is cool, but the lack of any group activity (raids?) is not cool.

The Witcher: Monster Slayer is a successful and well-structured product, capable of providing a fun experience to combine with a healthy walk.

At times Monster Slayer becomes a super immersive experience, and it’s always a joy to discover a new monster during a different time of day or when the weather changes. When that sense of wonder wears off after lots of grinding and walking around to find more monsters, you may begin to question whether you want to keep going. If you do, things get better as you stronger, but the path of a witcher is an arduous one and requires lots and lots of battles.

The Witcher: Monster Slayer is a slow grind that feels like it's still in beta. It's not refined enough to take the augmented reality crown from Pokémon Go, but with a lot of polish, we could one day have a new AR game for those who want something a little more grown-up than Pokémon.

There are some issues with The Witcher: Monster Slayer that will likely hold it back from being a huge success, but there's still a good game in here. Little touches like dialogue options in the quests, or the ability to unlock weapons and outfits that we've seen in other Witcher games are delightful inclusions. It's also less than 2GB according to my phone, so it won't eat much storage space. Sadly, the overall experience is marred by a gesturing towards microtransactions and a tendency for quests to lead you down real-life dead ends.