Leger vs. Castlevania: Lords of Shadow (Playstation 3)

I can live with the fact that the framerate is all over the place and more often than not not even close to thirty frames per second, because as ugly as it sometimes looks it does not affect the gameplay as much as it could have done.

I can also live with the fact that Lords of Shadow would do better without being linked to the Castlevania franchise; Except some familiar themes such as the main weapon acting like the whip while being a cross with an extension, werewolves and blood, lineage of certain characters and whatnot the game looks, feels and plays nothing like your ordinary 2D Castlevania and not so much as the 3D ones as you would think.

I can even live with the fact that it all comes together as a mishmash of other games doing whatever Lords of Shadow tries to do but often better.

One example would be the climbing and jumping from Prince of Persia, but here lacking both a camera working in tandem with the progress forward of the player and the subtile signs making it clear which parts of the environment to interact with.

Another one worth mentioning would be the Shadow of the Colossus inspired boss fights which at least during the first thid of the game never go far beyond making your way from a to b, breaking whatever breakable coming your way and grabbing hold of something to not be thrown off when the colossus starts to move in a quick and aggressive way.

Lords of Shadow even goes as far as throwing in some beast riding in the veins of Crash of Titans where different beasts can be mounted after having broken them down physically and mentally to be able to use their unique abilites to interact with the environment.

To mention that the fighting mechanics should be familiar to anyone having played Devil May Cry, Rygar: The Legendary Warrior or God of War almost seem redundant at this point, but there you have it. Whipping the shit out of enemies close or afar, doing airborne acrobatics, juggling the bastards around, stunning them, dodging and countering attacks and throwing daggers to mention one of the uses of sub weaponry.

Yes, and upgrading abilities as well as bying new ones.

Such is the flow of the game, through twelve chapters divided into closer to fifty stages, even with some backtracking thrown into the mix being able to reach previously out of reach sections of stages with new abilites.

Ignoring Gabriel Belmont's thick neck, almost wider than his head, the aesthetics of Lords of Shadow reside in the quite impressive category of graphics. Well, at least the environments are beautifully presented; Full of colours and wide open spaces with magnificent vistas countered with claustrophobic grey and brown catacombs and dusty abandoned cathedrals.

The characters do show their technical age, however, with Gabriel being the main offender just by acting annoyingly deadpan to whatever comes his way. It is not that he does not react in a human way, rather his enormous size and bulky appearance combined with subdued emotional expression makes it hard to bother about his perils.

But, whatever.

It is in the fighting the main bulk of the game resides, and while it starts out rather limited it only takes a couple of hours to see it expand into a button mashing fest with combos, blocking and dodging, using a myriad of different attacks on ground, in air or both combined.

And in the midst of it all a kind of magic meter is introduced, aswell as another, which both can be filled up by fighting impressively and getting bolts of magic to use as refill as a result. Light magic can be actived to inject yourself with parts of the health you drain from enemies and dark magic can be used to increase the amount of damage dealt. Also, magic can be used in combination with certain abilites to achieve things otherwise impossible.

When it alls falls into place, it works rather flawlessly and makes the fighting feel intense and dynamic. However, often it all boils down to using the main attack while dodging incoming attacks. Attacking while airborne makes Gabriel rather vulnerable and using the cross as a hookshot from the air seldom results in anything but him pulling himself close to the enemies which then throws him a punch.

After a while the fighting becomes quite monotonous and tedious, no matter what, especially when you see the scenes of battle coming from far away by the frequent open spaces in the stage design and knowing that they could have made some better choices with the controls; Keeping track of some ten buttons in the midst of an intense fight tends to get quite messy.

Traversing the stages can also be somewhat confusing, especially when they branch out into something not even close to linear. Often this is occuring in combination with some kind of fetch quest which turns into a quest of frustration due to the camera and stage design making it exetremly unclear as to where you are able to go.

The stages are full of invisible walls and the only way to know if you can go to a certain place is to try to go there. No logical rules seem to apply and after a while the trial and error starts to wear you down, especially when making a wrong turn can force you into replaying a huge chunk of a stage with all the bigger, almost always bullet sponging, enemy encounters reappering over and over.

And, yes, of course.

What once seemed like the introduction of a big and menacing boss will of course turn into the presence of the same entity as cannon fodder at a later stage. Sometimes even in large numbers, but always fought in a time consumingly fashion.

Having reached chapter twelve (out of, what I believe is fourtysix) after quite a few hours of playing and already feeling the repetetiveness kicking in making it hard to find motivation to carry on I simply decided to call it quits.

I tried to backtrack myself into getting 100% on earlier stages but it made the game feel even more disjointed than it already did. Tried to be methodical, logical, in my way of exploring a certain stage I got stuck on, but found myself running around in circles fighting the same boring enemies over and over again not finding the way forward.

Tried to have fun, to appreciate the game, but got bored, frustrated and with a constant feeling of playing a Playstation 2 game from the Devil May Cry era presented in HD but with all the flaws of the time not yet ironed out.

Honestly, there is no excuse to why I at times have to battle enemies while the camera is stuck behind a wall, and while the constant shaking of the camera obviously is meant to replicate some kind of natural motion and represents an artistic choice to bring forth certain feelings it seldom manages to do anything but make me feel nauseaus.

Lords of Shadow should have been a more focused experience, which instead of throwing everything at the wall hoping all of it would stick should have made an effort to heighten whatever actually got stuck while scraping off the rest of the darlings.

In this case less would certainly have been a way of probably offering more, and just the thought of spending some 15-30 more hours with the game (depending on desired rate of completion) brings forth a big NO.

And, I just realised.

The ambience of the soundtrack, while it never have annoyed me and certainly seemed to suit the aesthetics and overall presentation with its orchestral arragements and gloomy choirs (a truly competent and impressive effort, really), certainly lacked the classic Castlevania feel (like, every single note getting stuck in your head for decades to come, with godsent melodies and harmonies of gothic blizz).

But, no.

Nothing of the sorts.