Review for Castlevania: Lords of Shadow: Oblivium Sempiternum Daemonis

            The Castlevania bandwagon always appeared to me like just a Metroid knock-off. Well, it kind of was, but it was good. It was an answer to a wildly successful game to a public that wanted more and it took off, creating its own fan base. I was late to party and I could not regret it more. I have played (although not beaten) all of the Castlevania games for NES, SNES and the few that released for the DS. I even tried the attempts made to bring Castlevania to the consoles in the PS2/GCN/XBOX era. Those always left me wanting for more, they were not very well-produced games, and so I was left with a conditioning that Castlevania will always be doomed to old-school side-scrolling adventure. Upon seeing that Lords of Shadows was going to a reboot on Castlevania, I shied away immediately, knowing what I had experienced previously, my poor gamer heart can only take so much emotional abuse. We are a fragile people, us gamers.  After reading a lot and seeing what was released on the game, I decided it was worth a chance. After all, it looked so damn pretty.Initially, I was torn. There were things about it that I absolutely loved, but there were things that made me throw my controller to the ground, sending my battery pack sailing across the floor (took me 15minutes to find the damn thing). So I think the best way to bring to you the low down on Castlevania: Lords of Shadow is to be completely unoriginal and throw you the pros and cons!
        Good things: There are a’plenty. The immediately obvious thing about the game is that it is gorgeous, and the beauty is not limited to the cinematics, for the game-play looks just as good. There is a moment when Gabriel breaks through a stained-glass window, and the glass shatters all around him, the light is reflecting off all the shards of colored glass, and he is sailing through with the sun at his back, it really is quite inspiring. The environment was fluid and detailed. Very detailed. Too detailed sometimes, but I’ll mention that later. Not only the environment is a great testament to the visual beauty of the game. The characters act, flow and are animated with such perfection, I thought at times that actors had to have physically done this (and they probably did) because it was far to flawless. The voices matched perfectly with the animations of the characters, to create such a seamless experience. Voice acting is so so very crucial to gaming in this generation (for me anyway), and Konami knew that, and recruited a fantastic team to voice the characters in LoS. No complaints from me there. It is truly a marvelous thing, to see acting (animation), and voicing match in such a stunning manner.

Special thanks to IGN, for having awesome pictures.

Moving toward actual game-play mechanics, the obvious first step seems like combat. 99% of the time, I really enjoyed the combat. Gabriel wields his Combat Cross (such a lame name….) with such finesse and agility; it really is very fun to watch. The combos are easy, and are structured in such a way that feels very intuitive to string together 2-3 combos at a time. Gabriel can adapt two magical stances, which only increase the awe of his combat, and the pure amounts of kick-ass you can allow him to dish out. It really is a fun and fluid system, most of the time. Again I shall reach all of these negative Nancy comments in due time. My final praise for the game is the plot. As soon as you start the game, it immediately starts to put you behind the eyes of Gabriel. You are told his story, and are made to sympathise with him, he has been put through such an agonizing experience, he is a man who has nothing left to lose, but with everything to gain; he has but one motivation. His determination, while strong, is always conditional, for death would always bring him what he truly desires: To see his love once again.  The torment Gabriel endures is worn so well on character, without removing his stalwart demeanor as a warrior.  The narrations (voiced by Sir Patrick Stewart, making them the most comforting and soothing things you will every hear) through out the game describe Gabriel, and his decent into darkness so poetically; it so wonderfully evokes a powerful feeling of pathos in the player.

Bad Things: the part I don’t really want to do. For all my googly-eyed talk of how pretty is, how it manages to keep Castlevania charm and how much fun the combat is, all of those things have pretty noticeable flaws, flaws that made scoring this game quite difficult. I mentioned that the amount of detail was an issue, how can more beauty be a problem? Well figure it out! No wait don’t go! Okay, I’ll tell you… You see, during the game, you encounter many obstacles that need to be overcome by climbing on walls of cathedrals, castles, canyons walls and the like.  To do this, you mainly jump from ledge to ledge with the occasional need to swing to other parts using your Combat Cross. This is where an over active attention to detail became a problem. At times, the next ledge would not be overly apparent, the environment was so beautiful and realistic, that it was not always obvious where Gabriel could jump next, often times leading to the player attempting to make a jump to what they thought was a ledge and when it turned out NOT to be a ledge, well, you plummet to your death.  This was not a huge deal, but I mentioned it, so there 

Look Cool Mounts!! not...

My main issues with the game are the following three problems. Frame rate issues, inconsistent enemies (this happened far to frequently), and stupid STUPID mount mechanics. Normally I would have said a stuttering frame rate would kill a game. I cannot stand when a game is not fluid. Perhaps a majority of the pulls at the consistency of the frame rate was done on purpose, but it was hidden quite well. Upon completing a finishing move, the screen distorts slightly and “time” slows for a moment as you land the final hit. This hid the issue quite well. I speculate that is why they implemented such a feature, which, in my opinion is lazy. However, it was very effective, and I only noticed the issue when I was really paying attention to it. The average gamer will most likely look over it without a second thought. Still, it’s lazy. SEGWAY: The mini-bosses in the game were usually very obvious in declaring their greater importance to the every day baddie. They have health bars, they are mean. They varied in difficulty, but none were just “OMFG RAWR NERDRAGE!!!” hard.  The frustrating thing was that there were several versions of the little mass mobs you fight throughout the game that were bigger meaner and stronger than their less threatening counter-parts. You would be fighting little Lycanthropes, and huge friggen werewolf would occasionally show up and want to rofl-f**k your face. My issue with these variant monsters was that they were hard as shit! They were more often than not way harder than any of the mini-bosses and were often who you fought before fighting the mini-bosses. Fighting one at a time was not an issue, but the game would throw 3-4 at some point up to 6 at you at one time.

Again, I am not one to piss and moan about game difficulty, but I was playing on the 2^nd difficulty (one up from the easiest) and there were times where my controller became airborne. The other issue with these bastards was that they showed up all the bloody time. Every step you took, you were fighting another Vampire version 2.0 or four. It became annoyingly frequent, because every time was a chore, and instead of an enjoyable challenge, it was just effing vexatious.

Doesn't look much like Twilight does it? That is a real Vampire my children.

My last issue is so very minor, but my lord it was stupid. You would encounter obstacles that Gabriel could not surpass, so obviously you had to find something that could surpass this video-game vicissitude. The form, in which you did this, was a mount. Sounds pretty awesome doesn’t it? Riding Cave Trolls, forcing them to smash the bejeebers out of everything that moves. Well I guess it was, as long as you only wanted to stay in the first room, ya know the room in which you acquired this mount, because after you utilized your mounts ability once it becomes immediately useless, and you must kill it move on. Every. Bloody. Time. Oh also, the mounts are the same overly difficult reoccurring monsters I mentioned before, so you have to best them yet again, if you want to use them as mounts. AAAANNNNDDDDDD! If for whatever reason you accidentally kill the damn thing before mounting it, you get to beat it again. Ugghh... it was just really stupid and I hated it every time.  Luckily it didn’t occur too many times.

Look Magic! Look... Despair....

So that’s my yay and nay for Castlevania: Lords of Shadow. What does this mean for your wallet? Well, if it takes you a while to beat games, I recommend it.  Buy it, and just gnaw away at it. It is a surprisingly long game, over all it is very fun, and its problems are easy (enough) to over look for a casual gamer. You could play the game for 40hours and never find all the secrets, so if you are a completionist, get it; you will be chewing on it for a good long time. If you have a lame weekend at home by yourself and all of your friends are out of town (my situation) rent it. I buckled down and knocked it out in a weekend. Granted, I didn’t even come close to 100% and I didn’t play on the hardest difficulty, but it occupied my weekend very efficiently. So, there ya have it, children. Give Konami’s newest Castlevania: Lords of Shadow a check out, it’s worth it.

Score? 8 out of 10