Reviewed by Megan Parker
Castlevania is one of the longest running series of games and in most cases, they are good games. Not bad for being around for almost 20 years. Too bad this one doesn’t do the series justice.
You play as Hector, a former pupil of Dracula who gave up his powers as a devil forgemaster when Dracula betrayed him. Hector tries to live a “normal” life with his beloved, which of course doesn’t happen. Isaac, the main baddie in the game, decides to manipulate events which lead to Hector’s love’s death. Hector seeks out Isaac for revenge and in the meantime has to take up the powers of the devil forgemaster which he swore off years ago.
The first thing you notice about the game is the highschool acting. Actually, it’s worse than that. Highschool plays look Tony Award-winning compared to this drivel. Not only is the story boring, trite and annoyingly obvious, it’s made even worse by the horrible acting. Apparently, the voice actors took lessons from the original Resident Evil cast. Well, ok…it’s not that bad, but you get the picture.
If that was all that was bad, it would be a fairly good game. Unfortunately, it’s not the only disappointing thing about the game. The next thing you’ll notice is the glaringly horrible graphics. Graphics won’t necessarily make a game but they certainly can hurt it if it’s bad enough. In the case of Curse of Darkness, it is. The textures have very low resolution, the characters and environment are lackluster and dull. What is worse, though, is the very low draw distance. In what would make the original Playstation blush, the game actually has a fairly short distance you can see in front of you, even inside a building. This is five years after the PS2 came out, there’s really no excuse for it. I do like some of the gothic creature designs, so kudos to the concept artists.
Then, as you start to look beyond the graphics and hope that the gameplay makes up for the dumb story and lack of fantastic looking environments and characters, the music gets to you. That’s right… this Castlevania game has bad music, so bad you’ll have to turn it off to be able to play it. Instead of moody orchestral music as one might think, it’s horribly done electronic organ music that repeats after a very brief time.
The only thing I remotely liked about the game was the gameplay, but to be honest, not a lot. Fighting is very easy, as if it was the side scrolling 2D game of the handheld gaming. No real combos, mostly just the attack button. You can use the block or jump button to add “variety”. I’m not much for games with a lot of extensive combinations, but this is pretty simplistic.
Throughout the game you can find and summon various devils to fight or help you. The first one is a fairy devil. It would actually look really cute if it wasn’t for the badly placed crystal coming out of its butt. The devils aren’t all that intelligent and they tend to go off and attack when you don’t want to, or heal when you don’t need it. The enemy AI isn’t any better and is usually easily dealt with.
You do have the ability to find recipes and items as well as build weapons and armor for yourself. These will help your stats, but they aren’t too different from things you’ll see in a lot of RPGs.
It got to the point in this review when I had a very hard time getting myself to play the game. With the poor story, acting, graphics, music and gameplay, there really isn’t any reason to play it unless you’re a completist for the series. And even then, I still wouldn’t recommend it.