Quote:
Originally Posted by OxBlood
Really? I thought Castlevania was WAY better than God of war 3, which is probably the game you´ll be referring to.  If not, please continue
Though I do agree on the music and the camera to a certain extent. The music was just a lot of wasted potential. I mean, Castlevania games have about the best music in any videogame franchise ever most of the time and what we get here just doesn´t cut it. Not at all. The cam...well, it´s shaking all the time for no reason. Other than that I had no complaints about it. |
I intended for my response to be shorter, but things really took off once I got going:
The camera pisses me off because nearly every fight has been a case of me being just far enough from the camera and surrounded by just enough small, fast-moving enemies that the fights look like an argument between colored thumb prints. Plus, I find the sudden shifts in camera angles to be a bit disorienting, especially when the transition areas are placed near a fight.
As for the copying, a couple other reviews put it best: it's like they copied popular games without understanding what it was about those games that made them popular.
You've got combat from GoW, but the enemies overuse annoying attacks, in particular the ground pound that you have to avoid by jumping. Plus, buying more elaborate combos is all but pointless because they don't do that much more damage and pulling off long combos is too difficult on account of the nonstop blocking/dodging/countering from the enemies.
Then you've got the platforming and puzzle-solving from Prince of Persia. The problem with the platforming is that it holds your hand so much that it's little more than a slower version of walking to the next area. And the puzzles break up the action even more, but the game gives you the option to just solve them immediately in case you're getting bored. If the game had intense combat, I could see the reason for them including this stuff to give you a little break, but combat is just annoying, and then you have these boring interludes between battles.
And then there's the Shadow of the Colossus boss battles. Again, you've got an entertaining game element, but done in a terrible way. In SotC, the boss battles were epic because of the scale of things, but they were all the moreso because you had the anticipation of hunting down these large creatures beforehand. That way, you didn't get bored with slowly scaling and stabbing them. In contrast, putting such a battle in a action game, and dumbing down the entire affair so you're proceeding along a linear path looking for shiny spots so you can hit the magic context button, just slows things down even more, and that's when you're not getting shaken off and have to start things over again.
There's all that, plus the added bonus of having name-only references to Castlevania. Only the names of a few characters have made it in (Belmont, Cornell, Olrox, etc). The characters they were attached to have not. The best is Gabriel himself: in the game, they explain that he isn't even a Belmont; he just named himself "Belmont" because he thinks mountains are cool!