Review by: Mike Thompson

A moment of silence for poor Heinrich. He was only trying to do his job as an executioner until he wound up getting cursed by the witch on the chopping block. Not only is he unable to die, but now he's stuck with this horrible woman. Technically, he only has to hang out with her until she succeeds on her quest to vanquish evil from the land. However, based on how Knights Contract actually plays, Heinrich's time with the witch feels like a tortuous eternity.

The story goes like this: at an unspecified point of Medieval European history, the Black Plague sweeps through a fantasy-based version of the German countryside. A group of witches come out of the Black Forest to save humanity, but mankind turned against them because they were showing off too much cleavage and wearing leather chaps. As the final witch, Gretchen, is beheaded, she enacts a curse to make her executioner immortal because she knows she'll need help when she eventually comes back to life in order to cleanse the land of the evil that's spreading across it.

There may have been something mentioned about a petty church official that was trying to steal an artifact in order to gain immortality, but the story is so dull that it's hard to pay attention. That's a shame, too, because this is a plot that should be anything but boring. It's got witches and monsters and an immortal that only wants to die. But, somehow, the gameplay stretches everything out so that the plot moves at a snail's pace and the wildly uneven voice-acting makes the long cutscenes particularly unpleasant.

It's pretty obvious that Knights Contract desperately wants to be God of War, but it seems incapable of being considered anything more than a third-rate knock-off. Heinrich has a limited number of combos that he can unleash against the monsters shambling across the land, but they aren't all that impressive on their own. Killing enemies nets souls, which are used to purchase magic upgrades. Meanwhile, Gretchen can cast spells that will help out in combat; there's a quick-time-event if magic is used on an enemy with low health that results in both a soul bonus and a ton of extra gore.

This sounds like a neat gameplay mechanic. Indeed it is, for a little while, but there isn't enough variety in either the enemies or the combat to keep things entertaining. This becomes increasingly obvious as the game progresses, especially after Heinrich is forced to backtrack through the long, winding levels (which often happens because the game's map is useless and doesn't actually show where players should be headed). Also, every boss battle features an immensely frustrating -and sometimes overly long- quick time event that will test your patience to the extreme.

On top of this, the boss battles are a mess. Case in point: after a long, drawn-out battle, Gretchen suddenly summons a cathedral-sized guillotine that is used to finish off the monstrous witch Henirich is fighting. Why couldn't she just do this at the beginning of the fight?