RETRO REBOOT - Castlevania: Lords Of Shadow 2 (Xbox 360/PS3)

While the Castlevania series thrived on Nintendo's handhelds with the Game Boy Advance and DS systems, the series tried experimenting occasionally on major consoles throughout the late aughts. In 2010, the first big action game would be headed by Kojima Productions with an attempt at a reboot in Castlevania: Lords of Shadow. I found it to be an incredibly run-of-the-mill, button-mashing, QTE-filled snorefest. For Lords of Shadow 2, Kojima and staff were dropped, and the game saw some improvements, but otherwise still felt very dour, watery, and ultimately dated within itself.

This game picks up immediately after the first one, with Gabriel Belmont failing to save the family he's lost and has become an aging Dracula coming out of hiding and being approached by Zobek (it’s never made clear why these two are pals after the events in the first game, I’ll chalk it up to Gabriel still being an oblivious buffoon), who tells him that Satan is being resurrected and plans on taking over and these two must work together to stop him and his undead army.

Or it’s more like Gabriel stands around with one facial expression while Zobek orders him around. Gabe never questions anything, doesn’t object or makes any decisions on his own, he’s the same boring block of wood he was in the first game, he just has a 5 O’clock shadow this time around. Intertwined with Dracula’s modern-day misadventures in the most boring destroyed city in video game history are moments where Gabriel interacts with his son and wife from the past.

MercurySteam actually improved the combat over the first game, which was an inane button masher, by adding the Void Sword and the Chaos Claws. The Void Sword, does less damage than your Vampire Killer but restores health with successive hits. The Chaos Claws do more damage and can break through enemy defenses.

This lets you approach combat more tactfully, instead of hoping to just beat enemies into a pulp and you can actually string together some cool combos. An interesting dynamic, only slightly ruined by the damn sphere grid-like skill book you can fill out. As I've mentioned before, I'm very tired of skill trees.

Bells and whistles are bells and whistles and no substitute for creative balance and design. Essential necessities like a double jump or Mist form that helps get through walls are fine, but why in the ever-living hell would I ever need a move that takes nearly three seconds to charge (which is more than enough time for a skeleton to knock me on my ass), drains my magic, and doesn’t knock down slightly larger enemies? 

The cool combat is undermined by the incredibly boring quasi-open world Lords of Shadow 2 adopts. There is so much running around in this game it made my head spin!! It sucks that now developers can make these visually vast and minutely detailed locations that they forget us poor saps have to run through them. It totally doesn’t help matters that each location, even the ones that look good, are laid out in such a sloppy, overlong, forgettable manner that even when backtracking to a place that you may have just recently visited, you need a good five minutes to get your bearings together before even moving! These worlds serve little purpose beyond a distant location or waypoint just to grab an item, and backtrack AGAIN.

Lords of Shadow 2 is already a drag to navigate through, why not add some incredibly contrived sub-modes to this stressed game engine? Yeah, as an attempt to break up the monotony of running around, Gabriel can transform into a rat for some clunky stealth portions that involve sneaking pass armored sentries. I wield the power to tear wyverns and eight foot ghouls in half with my bare hands, but for THESE guys, I can't get caught?

In closing, the Lords of Shadow story wasn’t an interesting reboot in the first place, just revisionist history for the sake of doing it. A really solid combat system is mired in bland level design, forgettable characters, a lousy script (what a waste of Patrick Stewart), and a more than useless stealth element introduced for no reason. On top of it all, it's a very mean-spirited, dreary game that just made me hate myself a little more. Gabriel is a horrible protagonist, all of the characters feel flat, and uninterested, and the gratuitous violence feels more try-hardy than done in any artsy manner. I had already emotionally checked out one-fourth through, but around the time our "dark hero" main character impales a big-breasted woman in the face with an iron rod, I was confident the direction and story boarding was an edgy teenager's sketchbook. 

If Castlevania ever returns to mainline consoles with a fresh generational take, there's promise building on LoS2's gameplay, but the story needs a rebreather.

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