This seems to be happening a lot recently. A company takes a series that I love, and make a new game that just doesn’t seem to do the series justice. This is one such moment.

Castlevania is a series that I love, other than the 3D outings. The NES games are great, even Simon’s Quest (which suffered from badly-written NPC dialog and HAS to be beaten with a guide or map), the following-gen games (SNES, Genesis, PC-Engine CD) in the series were great (SCIV and RoB were fantastic), the change in style with SotN and all the handheld games that used that style were great… It has been a very solid series. With only a few black sheeps in the whole series.

Here, it’s taking a more God of War style, which really made me wary about it at first.

So read on and see if I enjoyed this change in style, or if it’s one of the aforementioned black sheeps

Developer: Mercury Stream
Publisher: Konami
Date of Release: October 5th
Platforms: Xbox 360, Playstation 3

Genre: Action
Rated M for Mature

What is good about this game
Graphics
The graphics are great here. Seriously, there was some serious work here making the environments look awesome. Even I sometimes stopped to look at the environments from time to time, they’re just gorgeous. The enemies are generally well-designed enough, though there’s obviously not a whole lot of originality, they still look really good. The human character design on the other hand isn’t great, but it works well enough. The Titans also look great, they’re huge but they really look well-made. The atmosphere is nice too. The dark places and snow-ridden lands could really get you into the game.

Voice acting
The voice acting is truly solid. Each of the characters has a voice that fits their character and look very well. The performances are generally very believable. Too bad the cutscenes suck, wasting the good performances. The narration during loading screen sounds badass too.

Some really good ideas
Really, a lot of things in the game are very good in concept, and sometimes even in practice. I like that the game is level-based. Being able to go back to older levels to find new power-ups you couldn’t before is cool, and having trials in every level can lead to some fun challenging moments. The light magic that heals you and the shadow magic that makes you deal more damage has a lot of potential to make for good risk VS reward gameplay. The leveling system to learn moves is fine. New equipment that gives you extra skills is a good idea. The Focus Meter that promotes good blocking/dodging and varied attack is a good idea. The idea of a Direct attack that hits single enemies but does more damage/stunning and an area attack that does less damage and doesn’t stun gives potential to varied combat. There’s quite a few things in here that had tons of potential to lead to a great game.

What needs work in this game
The combat
The combat is… adequate. It’s not really good, but it’s not really bad. It’s less button-mashy/spam-y than God of War, but it’s still incredibly simplistic and easy. Basically, almost all you ever need is “Do 3-4 hits from the basic Direct attack combo, afterwards dodge as needed, rinse and repeat”.  That’s generally enough to take care of anything, even “harder” mid-boss battles (with the occasional addition of light magic to heal yourself if you forget to dodge, or shadow magic to kill faster). Yeah, there’s other moves, but, beyond boosting the focus meter faster (a full focus meter gives you neutral magic that you can convert to light or shadow with every hit, rather than just when you kill an enemy) and dealing a very slight amount of extra damage, they’re not really useful. Even the moves that do have a use feel rather pointless when you really never NEED to use anything other than the basic combo, even on hard mode (didn’t try paladin difficulty yet). And, when you buy the ultimate moves for both light and shadow magic, you just become broken.

I mean, sure, you have tons of options in battle, but when only one attack combo is actually needed to kill anything in the game, it makes the fighting system feel incomplete.

Lack of camera control
That’s usually not a big problem in this game, most of the time the camera angle has a good view of all the action, so you will usually not get cheap-shoted by off-screen enemies. But there ARE some times where the camera is place too close to you, making it impossible to see attacks coming from behind the camera, or making it hard to see where to go. Or sometimes the camera will change angles at random which can screw with your controls. And, considering how good the environments look, why not let us look at it a bit? The right stick is useless right now, why not give camera control?

The subweapons/ugrades are useless/stupid
The daggers are useful at first. But, after a few levels, you stop fighting Lycans, or at least fight fewer of them. By then, daggers don’t do much anymore. There’s fairies, but they’re useless from the start, other than in that one terrible Chupacabra segment (both of them suck, but this one is particularly bad) where you need to have at least one. The crystal replenishes too fast and it’s way too over-powered (kills everything in the room, deals good damage to bosses), it’s just way too cheap so I stopped myself from using it as much as possible. The Holy Water is the only mildly useful because of the light magic skill you can get that gives you a special shield, but in actual battle it’s really only useful against vampires. Overall, the sub-weapons are rarely used since they’re just not powerful enough, or, in the case of the Crystal, so powerful that it breaks the game.

The upgrades you get are stupid too. They could be SO useful, but all of them, no exception, have only a few uses in some puzzles, and maybe key boss fights (or going back to older levels to reach upgrades you couldn’t before). Sort of the standard “get the upgrade, use it once or twice, never use it again”. The few that can be used in battle are pointless That’s sort of pathetic.

What sucks about this game
It’s not Castlevania
And that’s quite a big problem when Castlevania is the title of the game. Nothing in the game really feels like Castlevania. There’s a few enemies here and there that look similar to previous Castlevania enemies, and some characters were given the names of previous Castlevania character, but that’s about it.

SPOILERS FOR THE ENDING STARTING HERE… amongst other things
There’s technically no Belmont. You’re not using a whip (though the weapon is sort of whip-like… I guess). Adding a stake to the Combat Cross was a stupid excuse for calling it “The Vampire Killer”. There’s technically no Dracula (other than a stupid plot-twist in the epilogue). There’s technically no Death (sort of). The final boss is Satan (wtf?). There’s no medusa heads in the Clock Tower (or anywhere for that matter). Very few enemies return from older castlevania games, and the ones that do look nothing like in the other games. They hype up the fact that you’re in Frankenstein’s lab but, instead of making you fight the frankenstein monster, you fight a robot spider thing… And I could probably go on some more. WTF is going on here?
SPOILERS END HERE.

The gameplay feels like a better God of War rather than a 3D Castlevania (the N64 Castlevania games still felt like Castlevania… despite sucking), the game looks Castlevania-ish only a few times, and the story is just not Castlevania at all. Speaking of the story, there’s some plot points that are sort of forgotten partway through, and some parts that just make no sense whatsoever, but I’m not gonna talk about that. Though I will mention that the plot isn’t really good or well-written.

The only moment I thought “Oh shit, this is sort of like Castlevania” is in one of the later chapters in the games, where I broke a candle in the castle level. Weak.

The music
Castlevania is a series that is well known for its awesome music, amongst the best in the industry since the NES. Here? Well, frankly, I can’t even remember one tune. Why? Because it goes in the modern gaming ideal of having movie music instead of video game music. Movie music is just not interesting in games. Not much more to say here.

The cutscenes
They’re just so boring. Even if the voice acting is great, it doesn’t help making the boring conversations anymore interesting. Because that’s just about the only types of cutscenes you get. I mean, conversations can be awesome if filmed in an interesting way, have some cool editing, and if they’re well-written and just overall fun to listen to. Just check out something like Reservoir Dogs, or certain dialogues in Scott Pilgrim. It doesn’t need to be boring when characters are talking. Some action scenes are kinda cool, but they’re few and far between.

There’s no platforming
Castlevania, at least in the old days (much less in the MetroidVanias, but still a bit), was well known for its super-precise and difficult platforming. Here there’s only a few segments of actual platforming. Only one that I can remember, but there might be a few I forgot. Rather than actual platforming, you have this crappy “hang from and shimmy along ledges” type of “platforming” that’s just completely automatic and never fun to play (why do developers continue using that?). Quite disappointing.

The fights against Titans
These are based on the Colossus fights in Shadow of the Colossus. Those… weren’t too great really. And they’re just as not fun here as they were in Shadow of the Colossus. It’s just the crappy type of “ledge shimmying” stuff you get in the rest of the game in regards to “platforming”, the rest is holding R2 when the game tells you, and dodging when the game tells you. It’s just really not interesting. Each of them are basically big QTEs. The titans look cool, but they’re not fun to fight.

QTEs
They suck. Always have, always will. It’s no different here. Some cutscenes require you to press buttons, most grabs make you press buttons during the kill animation, and some doors require QTEs too. It’s just bad.

Overall
Castlevania: Lords of Shadow is a wasted opportunity. If they had smoothed out all those rough edges, such as the combat, the useless upgrades/equipment, the useless sub-weapons, got a better story, kicked out the QTEs, used actual platforming rather than that crappy “grab on to ledges” stuff, better use of Castlevania elements… it could have been really damn good. It’s filled with great ideas, but they’re great ideas that never reach their full potential because the rest of the game doesn’t really try to reach said potential, and just stops at being slightly average.

As it stands, this game joins an ever-growing list of “it’s pretty, but it’s boring” type of games. More effort was put into making it look good rather than making it fun to play. I had hopes that maybe it would end up being a solid game, but so many bad decisions were done that it ends up not being really good. It has some good things, and I could see why people would enjoy it (if they haven’t played better action games like Bayonetta

Pros and Cons
Pros
- Looks great
- Good voice acting
- Lots of great ideas
- Some puzzles are fairly interesting
- It is fairly long, lasting longer than the average modern game

Cons
- The story isn’t very interesting
- The QTEs are annoying
- The fighting system isn’t nearly as good as it could be
- Crappy platforming
- Uninteresting music
- Lack of camera control
- Not being Castlevania when Castlevania is in the title

The Save Factor
As it stands, the game costs 60$ new. That’s way too much for me, but there is a good amount of things to do, with the trials in every level and the unlockable Paladin difficulty. For me, I wouldn’t pay more than 15$ for this… But, objectively, considering the production value, average gameplay and amount of content, 40$ would be a fair price.

jobocan Console, Games, ps3, Review, xbox 360