Castlevania: Lords of Shadow

Release: 2010
Platform: PC
Genre: 3rd person, Action
Developers: Mercury Steam, Kojima Productions
Publisher: Konami
Gameplay Stats: 27 hours, 20/47 Steam Achievements, Knight difficulty

I'm a huge fan of the Castlevania series, but I haven't tried one of the 3d games in the series. With Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night coming out this summer, I'm pretty stoked and wanted to play some more of the series that spawned the 'Igavania' genre. So... I decided to ignore what I've heard and give Castlevania Lords of Shadow a try. Oi...

Visuals: For a game released in 2010 this game looks pretty solid! It doesn't hold up too well in 2019, but I'm sure this game was a sight to behold when it released. The creatures and environments are pretty good! The effects are okay, but the thing here that really turned me off was the fixed camera. I haven't played a game like this in a while, and man it was tough getting used to. It is also a little bit tough to read exactly where you can and can't go because this game chooses style over function in the aesthetics. Particularly late in the game when you get more exploration abilities, I lost so much health trying to get to places that weren't actually reachable.

Sounds: The music in this game is pretty good. Nothing that I will likely return to, but also not distracting. The noises that creatures make are pretty annoying. Lots of loud grunting, I have to wonder why the game designers decided that this was the best audio balance. On this note, I'd be remiss not to mention that the Chupacabra enemy is actually the most annoying enemy I've ever encountered in a game. He steals your upgrades and taunts you mercilessly. The only problem is that he has very few vocal lines that he repeats ad nauseum. There are sections where he has time to say 5 lines, but only has 4 recorded. Who thought this was a good idea?! You HAVE to hear a repeat. That being said, they got Patrick Stewart as a voice actor for one of the human characters and he's a delight.

Plot: It's actually kind of garbage. You start out after some traumatic event with no explanation. Just the goal that you have to resurrect your fallen love. A MacGuffin if I've ever seen one. There is almost no exposition throughout the entire game until a 30 minute long cut scene before the big bad boss fight. The whole game is just a series of goals that are expressed in the weirdest way. They made individual levels and then got the narrator to say something about them before each one. There is not any communication to the main character Gabriel, so how he is supposed to know what to do is beyond me. It's borderline Kingdom Hearts levels of nonsense.

Gameplay: I don't know what to say here. I think the game is confused about what it wants to be... It looks like it wants to be an action game, but it controls sluggishly and your moves are locked into animations. The movement isn't snappy, you can't interrupt actions with your dodge roll, and hitboxes don't match what they should. This mixed with a fixed camera makes it really tough sometimes to know what to do in a fight. I didn't have too hard of a time until the final fight. I found it annoying and instead of quitting the game, I dropped the difficulty. The only difference that I noticed between them was how much health I had when I retried the fight. Which made it more manageable!

This game was kind of garbage. I went into it open minded and bought this game and its sequel as a pack. I don't think I'll even try the sequel because I've been led to believe it's more of the same. This game was pretty "meh" for the most part, but bordered into offensive at other points. We have learned so much about game design since this came out, it's almost shocking. 4.5/10