Developed by Lienzo, Hunter’s Legacy is an action-adventure platformer that follows the story of Ikki, a warrior cat who must defeat the evil Morodir and reclaim a stolen artifact to save her kingdom. I hadn’t heard of Hunter’s Legacy before playing it, and I think because I didn’t go in with any expectations, I ended up enjoying it more. Its pleasant art style and fluid gameplay make up for a cliché narrative.
Hunter’s Legacy is exactly like any stereotypical fantasy story if you replace the humans with a race of intelligent bipedal cats. As the kingdom decayed over time when the Fang of Alliance was stolen, Ikki was tasked with its retrieval. You encounter Morodir, the one who stole it, early on in the game but he teleports away to another location, taking safe haven behind a magic barrier. In order to unlock it, Ikki needs to find Sacred Orbs across the kingdom. There’s nothing special about the story itself, but the cats do add a nice charm to it.
While Ikki is presented as a great huntress, she starts off with just a sword in her arsenal and quickly gains a bow as well. After making it to Iripur town, you can choose to upgrade your weapons and health if you have enough resources and money. You will also unlock multiple skills throughout your playthrough such as magic arrows or down strike, both of which destroy objects blocking your path. There isn’t a lot to the combat itself as you’ll frequently just swing your sword by mashing X and shoot arrows with Y. Ikki unfortunately doesn’t have access to enough unique abilities that would make the gameplay more dynamic. Thankfully, there are various enemy types throughout that make the game more fun.
The levels themselves are all connected and can be accessed through various teleporters. Different locations offer different obstacles, like tall grass that you can get stuck in or lava floors that cause damage if you don’t run over them quick enough. Because there isn’t a mini map, I had to constantly open up the larger overworld map in the menu to see if I was going in the right direction. Progress is automatically saved when walking by a stone shrine, so even if I was lost, I could rely on checkpoints. These especially came in handy before boss fights.
You know when you’re about to encounter a boss because you’ll be overwhelmed with health and ammo supplies. For the most part, these serve as fun challenges that at times become a bit frustrating if you are not sure what to do. For example, the boss in Willow Forest, Goliath Treehopper Menla, is a sort of insect-type creature that releases spores containing other enemies. Shooting it with arrows and slashing it with my sword did nothing, and it took me a few minutes to realize what I was doing wrong. This boss would crawl to the top of the screen and hang below the ceiling, almost like a spider hanging from a web. I realized that I needed to shoot what it was hanging from to finally do some damage. This then led to later stages in the fight where it released spores of multiple enemies and would become enraged and perform drop attacks. My saving grace was the fact that killing the smaller enemies would grant me health.
Taking advantage of 2D cartoon-like graphics and vivid colors, Hunter’s Legacy is another visually appealing sidescroller, with a wide range of locations ranging from jungles, swamp lands, and forests to snowy mountains and volcanoes. It may not stand out amongst other platformers, but that certainly doesn’t make it bad. If anything, I quite enjoyed the colorful graphics.
Summary
Depending on your skill, Hunter’s legacy can be beaten in around five hours. While the combat is simplistic, overall the gameplay is solid with responsive, smooth controls. You can find its story almost anywhere in any form of media, but it’s also the type of story that never gets old. Seeing as the title is only $7 on Xbox One, it’s hard not to recommend it to fans of Metroidvania titles.
Jennifer is a games journalist, former games journalist and PR Manager at Gearbox. They contributed 234 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: went on to write for Windows Central and later managed PR for Gearbox Software.