Castlevania: Lords of Shadow

Man this game makes me sad. Castlevania is in my top 3 favorite video game franchises, and this game dropped the ball. I don't have an issue with the direction the game took, as much as I love the metroidvania genre, some of the best castlevania games aren't even metroidvanias like 4 or bloodlines. The God of war clone for the series in theory is a great idea for the franchise. And when the games going good, it's going real good. I had some real fun times in this. The problem is that I'm going to remember the bad. I'll end on a good note so I'll get the bad stuff out of the way now. This game does not tell you anything at all. You are sent into this game blind and are left to fend for yourself against a pack of wolves, but it's not wolves it's demons. It just assumes you know exactly what you need to do, because there are no tutorials, and when there's "indicators" to tell you what to do, it's non visible. I won't get into details because I have ptsd because of this game, but I almost smashed walls in my house a good amount of times. If you play, have a guide or YouTube video available at all times. This frustration is for both combat and traversal. It can be so unclear and flat out infuriating at times, one time I had to shut the game off mid level or else my hand or wall was breaking, or both. The QTE's sucked in this game as well. I failed them countless times because they're in cutscenes. Also, the little guys who steal your stuff, whoevers idea it was to put him in the game many times, you deserve pain. To transition to the good, the story really is whatever, especially the last act being full of twists and turns that they believe feel huge when in actuality they're meaningless. Now the ending ending of the game however, is a really cool twist. Not spoiling anything, but it actually made me pop for the story when the rest was bland. Although I clearly voiced my angers with the game, when the combat and traversal are simple, they flow really well and it's a lot of fun to play through. I know simple isn't something that might strike interest into you, but it really was a good time when I didn't want to commit arson. Now I don't recommend this game to everyone. If you have a tolerance for frustration, go for it, if you like castlevania and never played this, then I think you can find enjoyment. I can't really recommend this to many others. If you find it interesting go for it, but I won't promise you'll enjoy it

It was MID

Awfull controls and some game mechanics, a lot of unnecessary moves, you forget they exist or just generally bad to use. Also dlc sucks, ditched it after few stages.

Underrated

This game was hit a little to hard with the 7th gen game design tropes stick. It's certainly a functional action game, but not an exciting one.

- Uninspired gameplay and restricted level design
- The same (mostly uninteresting) information being told to you multiple times (at least once by Patrick Stewart in seemingly never-ending narrations over text and at least once more in a brisk in-engine cutscene)

Nice to see how far MercurySteam has come since the release of this though in terms of quality.

Amazing game with a good and entertaining story, good combat and gameplay. The downsides are the many puzzles (at least they are well built) and the last boss from both the main game and DLC have awful designs.