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The road to Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 was a short, but still bumpy one. The first game was an uneven adventure that set up the plot of its sequel with a post-credits twist that made absolutely no sense, while Mirror of Fate made poor use of its classic Metroidvania format and told its story with a disastrous structure. And here we are, with the last game of the trilogy, Lords of Shadow 2, which manages to be worse than its predecessors: although it still shares most of their problems, it also displays an alarming lack of creativity and direction.
The premise was already set. Dracula is alive in the twenty-first century and Zobek warns him that Lucifer is about to free [...]
When it was released back in 2010, Castlevania: Lords of Shadow shook the franchise to its core, switching genres and rebooting the entire storyline. Instead of being a Metroidvania, putting the focus on the exploration of a labyrinthine environment, the game follows the God of War approach of creating awe-inspiring set-pieces punctuated by brutal action. The game mostly succeeds at what it tries to do, building a melancholic atmosphere while telling a tragic and exciting tale, but it is also dragged down by strange narrative decisions, a baffling post-credits scene, and problematic controls.
The protagonist is Gabriel Belmont, a knight of the Brotherhood of Light chosen to [...]
Metroid: Samus Returns, the 3DS remake of Metroid II: Return of Samus, seeks to reimagine certain elements of the original, but focuses on all the wrong elements: instead of improving the original’s linear structure or doubling down on its foreboding atmosphere, Samus Returns decides to revamp the combat and visuals, making them flashier and more complex. The result is a disappointing game that misses what worked in Metroid II without adding much in return.
The plot is fairly straightforward. Bounty hunter Samus Aran is hired to go to the alien planet SR388 and commit, well, genocide: she’s to kill all Metroids in the planet, ridding the universe of the species.
Killing [...]
Lords of Shadow is a subtitle many Castlevania fans – wary of change – have come to dread. For the first game to take that name changed the series’ direction from exploration to action and spectacle. Some of the previous games, such as Symphony of the Night and Aria of Sorrow, gave “Metroidvania” its suffix, cementing it as a genre thanks to their interconnected environments, feeling of desolation, little sense of direction, and a design that links progression to backtracking. The first Lords of Shadow, on the other hand, was more like God of War, with its protagonist using long chains to dismember his enemies during some elaborate set-pieces. Mirror of Fate, them, [...]