My Rants: Castlevania: Lords of Shadow

This game is a bit confusing for me, not confusing as it's bad or good but confusing as in people thinks its bad? I mean I've seen plenty of reviews saying that it's a pretty bad game. Yet I bought both the original Castlevania: Lords of Shadow and its sequel and so far I've only played the first one and to be honest, I don't think this game is that bad? It's actually pretty fun, challenging, and sometimes frustrating. Sure the quick time events are tedious where you got to press X at a certain time or press a button repeatedly but besides that it's pretty interesting. It presents a challenge even on the easiest settings just like its predecessors, it follows the Belmont lineage, the story is interesting, as well as its characters.

The game starts with you knowing the issue, God has severed his ties to the world and darkness spreads across the land. You then start playing as a man named Gabriel Belmont an agent of the Brotherhood of Light and widow of Marie. There you are sent to a place known as Lake Oblivion that has the power to contact the dead. There you meat your deceased wife who tells you that you must kill the Lords of Shadow and collect their power to save the world. So with your whip like weapon known as the Combat Cross you must fufill a prophecy to defeat the Lords of Shadow and discover the truths that has yet to be revealed.

Now gameplay wise it plays sort of like Devil May Cry, well camera wise to be exact. Your camera is set on a certain position as your slay, climb, and solve puzzles to progress through the game, though you wont be able to beat the game without hunting for special gems. You see in the game, there are these special gems that can upgrade your health bar and magic bars. Why I said magic bars instead of magic bar, well there are two types of magics, there's Light magic that helps restore health when you hit enemy and cures your poison, and there's Dark magic that increases your damage output and let you perform certain abilities to unlock certain pathways and maneuvers or defeat your enemies.

For certain enemies like the Vampire Warrior for example, when their health are low enough they emit a golden aura around them where it's your chance to grab them, perform a certain mechanic to either mashing a certain button, or pressing the trigger button (X for Xbox 360, Square for PS3) at a certain time when the bright circle is inside the dark circle. What's even better is from the variety of enemies you can encounter. You can go after rememberable enemies such as Vampires and Werewolves, to giant Ogres and Wargs. What's even better, you're practically making them go extinct! Yeah, that Ogre you just killed, that was the last of their kind. No more ogres in the world, they're now extinct thanks to you.

However there are some other annoying things in the game, one annoying thing in the game I have to address is the damn Chubacabra. That fucking goblin chuckle fuck keeps stealing my shit and makes me play hide and seek with it! I don't want to play hide and go seek damn it, I want to progress through the game and kill the Lords of Shadow! What's even worse is that the damn thing barely tells you where he is. It says when you are warm or cold, but when you are warm you're actually nowhere near him! What the fuck!

Then there's back tracking, you can already guess you're not going to get everything on the first run even if you try. So unless you're like me who goes around every level looking for special gems to upgrade my health, light and shadow magic bars, or Brotherhood Arks to upgrade my equipment you're going to have a pretty tough time. And when I say back tracking I mean when you are really far in the game, like far enough to have beaten the Vampire Queen. There you practically have the three main relics as well as some Combat Cross upgrades to help you hunt down the Brotherhood Arks and the special gems.

There are a total of I believe three main relics you can use. There's the Cyclone Boots where you can sprint more faster and jump farther while sprinting to get across certain gaps, there's the Black Knight Gauntlet that makes you be able to punch heavy objects and push them around, and the Seraph Shoulders that makes you do a double jump and get across large gaps with ease. You can also combine the effects of two relics to be given either abilities to unlock secret locations, or fight off your enemies.

And in the end of it all, you get to see that this game is pretty good. It has a sad ending, a pretty good twist in the end, a challenging final boss battle, and an epilogue that will leave you in question that will make you wanna say "Boy, I wonder what happened to Gabriel Belmont? Did he repent his sins, did he live a happy life of sunshine and lollypops?" Well my friends, that is up to it's next sequel.