Game link: http://www.konami-castlevania.com/castlevania-lords-of-shadow-2/
Steam link: http://store.steampowered.com/app/239250/
The last few years have seen some of Japan's biggest names attempting to resurrect tired franchises with the assistance of Western studios, not always with any great success. Still, for every Lost Planet 3, Resident Evil: Operation Racoon City and Bionic Commando, there has been the odd success, most notably Ninja Theory's DMC: Devil May Cry and Mercury Steam's Castlevania: Lords of Shadow. By combining the combat of a God of War or Devil May Cry with the vampire lore of Castlevania, then adding great monsters, creepy settings and colossal bosses, the latter became one if the surprise action hits of 2012, and laid the groundwork for what should have been a Castlevania revival.
That's should have been, because Lords of Shadow 2 isn't nearly so satisfying. It's an accomplished brawler with high production values that's genuinely great in parts, but it’s too baroque, too confused and too wildly incoherent to meet the standards set by its prequel. What's good really is very good, but there's not nearly enough of it. And the not-so-good stuff? Well, there’s far, far too much of that.
The game starts with a bang: about a thousand of them, in fact, as a gigantic war golem smashes into Dracula's castle, leading to a God of War-style opening that sets a pace the rest of the game can't match. Not that MercurySteam should necessarily have attempted non-stop bombast. But Lords of Shadow 2 is curiously flat thereafter, devolving into a series of near-automated platforming and enemy encounters that fail to stimulate and, thanks to the camera, even outright frustrate.
Combat is further fleshed out around two other weapons that you reclaim along the way: The Void Sword and the Chaos Claws. Once obtained, you can equip either one with the touch of a shoulder button. Each weapon has its own inherent ability – the Void Sword recovers your health with each connected hit and the Chaos Claws break enemy armor – and they each have their own Skills and mastery gauge. These weapons require magic though, which you can refill at altars or by performing uninterrupted combos.
The magic adds a degree of strategy to the combat, as resource management becomes important. There are items you can collect along the way that refill your health and magic, but using the Void Sword becomes an essential part of the game. The Chaos Claws are similarly vital. Switching between the various weapons and learning the different combat styles takes practice.
Sadly, enemy design and the fights themselves aren't up to much, often requiring the same tactics over and over to defeat your foes. Each seems to ascribe to one of two default modes: turtle or rush, and despite your offensive options there's not much joy in fighting them. Figuring out your opponents is the heart of any combat game, but here they're neither smart enough to pose an interesting challenge nor dumb or numerous enough to make you feel like, well, Dracula.
The whole concept bears much of the blame. Lords of Shadow was - ingeniously - an origin story, slowly revealing how the heroic Gabriel Belmont turns away from the light to become Castlevania's Dracula, so cursing his line for generations to come. Lords of Shadow 2? Well, after many hours of play I still not entirely sure what it's about. Gabriel/Dracula is struck down in a confrontation with good Christian invaders, who clearly take an exception to the presence of vampire princes in their midst, and awakens several centuries later in a skewed version of our modern world.
Players spend time in two connected worlds in CLOS2, Castlevania City and Dracula's own displaced palace. They connect at specific parts of the map and you can wander around off-path in the gameworld. The execution generally holds true to the time-honored 'Vania principles of recursive exploraion and progress: go get another power/item to get to that other place you couldn't get to before.P
But the level design all too often makes exploration a boring chore, with areas that look frustratingly similar and pathways that are obnoxiously obscured. In the latter part of the game, I fought off wave after wave of respawning enemies while trying to get at an exit obscured by a vertical pathway I'd used before. Cool, I must need to go there again, right? That's what Castlevania games are all about! Nope. The place I needed to go was behind the ladder I was climbing like an idiot for 20 minutes. Either point me at the right place or not, CLOS2; don't half-ass it and throw an endless wave of big demons at me at the same time.
Beyond this, however, things go horribly wrong. Come on, hands up, who thought stealth sequences featuring insta-kill guards were a great idea? Not only do the oversized armoured goons look like Quake 2’s Strogg, but it seems ridiculous that Gabriel can’t just rip through them when he’s sliced and battered his way through several screen-filling bosses already. Why add a mechanic where you can shift between the two worlds if you’re not going to use it to do anything interesting? It’s not like there aren’t enough great dual-world games to learn from. Why hire top-grade actors – Robert Carlyle plays Gabriel and Patrick Stewart phones in Zobek – if you’re not going to give them decent dialogue? And why pad things out with so many tedious, needlessly-protracted sections when you could have had a better game that lasted half the time?
Even visually, Lords of Shadow 2 can’t get things consistently right. For all the fine Gothic art-design in Gabriel’s costume and the castle, some of the character models are horrific in all the wrong ways, and the architecture and textures in the modern setting couldn’t be more generic or bland. If Lords of Shadow felt like the work of a small studio punching above its weight, this feels like the work of the same studio stretched to breaking point.
Lords of Shadow bought the classic vampire series back to life, but the sequel seems hell-bent on putting it back six feet under. Somewhere in here there’s a decent game with strong mechanics and a rich, Gothic art style, but it’s buried beneath an incomprehensible mess of a story, an ugly modern setting and a mass of unnecessary flab. A grave disappointment.I would give this game a dissapointing 5.5 out of 10.So what do you guys think? Be sure to let me know in the comment section down below.
The magic adds a degree of strategy to the combat, as resource management becomes important. There are items you can collect along the way that refill your health and magic, but using the Void Sword becomes an essential part of the game. The Chaos Claws are similarly vital. Switching between the various weapons and learning the different combat styles takes practice.
Sadly, enemy design and the fights themselves aren't up to much, often requiring the same tactics over and over to defeat your foes. Each seems to ascribe to one of two default modes: turtle or rush, and despite your offensive options there's not much joy in fighting them. Figuring out your opponents is the heart of any combat game, but here they're neither smart enough to pose an interesting challenge nor dumb or numerous enough to make you feel like, well, Dracula.
The whole concept bears much of the blame. Lords of Shadow was - ingeniously - an origin story, slowly revealing how the heroic Gabriel Belmont turns away from the light to become Castlevania's Dracula, so cursing his line for generations to come. Lords of Shadow 2? Well, after many hours of play I still not entirely sure what it's about. Gabriel/Dracula is struck down in a confrontation with good Christian invaders, who clearly take an exception to the presence of vampire princes in their midst, and awakens several centuries later in a skewed version of our modern world.
Players spend time in two connected worlds in CLOS2, Castlevania City and Dracula's own displaced palace. They connect at specific parts of the map and you can wander around off-path in the gameworld. The execution generally holds true to the time-honored 'Vania principles of recursive exploraion and progress: go get another power/item to get to that other place you couldn't get to before.P
But the level design all too often makes exploration a boring chore, with areas that look frustratingly similar and pathways that are obnoxiously obscured. In the latter part of the game, I fought off wave after wave of respawning enemies while trying to get at an exit obscured by a vertical pathway I'd used before. Cool, I must need to go there again, right? That's what Castlevania games are all about! Nope. The place I needed to go was behind the ladder I was climbing like an idiot for 20 minutes. Either point me at the right place or not, CLOS2; don't half-ass it and throw an endless wave of big demons at me at the same time.
Beyond this, however, things go horribly wrong. Come on, hands up, who thought stealth sequences featuring insta-kill guards were a great idea? Not only do the oversized armoured goons look like Quake 2’s Strogg, but it seems ridiculous that Gabriel can’t just rip through them when he’s sliced and battered his way through several screen-filling bosses already. Why add a mechanic where you can shift between the two worlds if you’re not going to use it to do anything interesting? It’s not like there aren’t enough great dual-world games to learn from. Why hire top-grade actors – Robert Carlyle plays Gabriel and Patrick Stewart phones in Zobek – if you’re not going to give them decent dialogue? And why pad things out with so many tedious, needlessly-protracted sections when you could have had a better game that lasted half the time?
Even visually, Lords of Shadow 2 can’t get things consistently right. For all the fine Gothic art-design in Gabriel’s costume and the castle, some of the character models are horrific in all the wrong ways, and the architecture and textures in the modern setting couldn’t be more generic or bland. If Lords of Shadow felt like the work of a small studio punching above its weight, this feels like the work of the same studio stretched to breaking point.
Lords of Shadow bought the classic vampire series back to life, but the sequel seems hell-bent on putting it back six feet under. Somewhere in here there’s a decent game with strong mechanics and a rich, Gothic art style, but it’s buried beneath an incomprehensible mess of a story, an ugly modern setting and a mass of unnecessary flab. A grave disappointment.I would give this game a dissapointing 5.5 out of 10.So what do you guys think? Be sure to let me know in the comment section down below.
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