The game has only the framework of a narrative to keep the player moving from scene to scene. The characters are all so dreadfully bland, with the worst offender being the protagonist himself - Gabriel. He rarely says anything, and when he does you'd wish he hadn't. I've never heard a voice actor sound this uninterested in their own work before.

The game starts strong with regular boss fights and new scenery for each level, but at the back of my mind I kept wondering "how long are they gonna keep this variety up before it starts just recycling what's already been used?" The answer is: not long at all. The game is strong for the first couple hours, and quickly descends into tedium from there as the levels start to blend together visually and the same three enemies make up all the combat encounters. Online sources say the same is 18 hours long, which is actually criminal. You're getting your money's worth, I guess, but that is far beyond what a game of this scale should be. There's a reason all the old God of Wars (the games this is clearly influenced by) are all done in 5-8 hours.

The game feel here is also not great. The combat has some good ideas - I like the crystal system that makes you choose between healing and dealing extra damage - but it just feels bad to play. And no amount of good ideas can save a game that just isn't fun to control. If it wasn't clear, I didn't finish this one. It became too tedious and eventually at one point the plot contrived me to have to go and collect some keys or something for the dozenth time and I gave up bothering.

Esse game é um caso misto. O fato de carregar o nome Castlevania em seu título faz com que ele tenha um peso e uma expectativa a cumprir, porém, ele cumpre esse objetivo de forma muito arrastada. Enquanto seu sistema de combate consegue ser divertido e recompensador de masterizar, o mesmo não pode ser dito da sua história. Para melhor explicar, faz-se da seguinte forma:

Combate: O game é um hack'n slash. Portanto, é de se esperar que ele terá um foco maior na ação e no combate. Ele consegue cumprir isso de forma esplendorosa, oferecendo muitos momentos de ação de fazer o jogador se sentir no combate e com bastante emoção, seguidos de uma trilha sonora que faz a imersão ser maior ainda. A variabilidade de armamentos que é possível usar para vencer os inimigos é modesta, porém, o suficiente para fazer você sentir o dinamismo da gameplay crescer. No geral, seu combate consegue atingir todas as expectativas de um hack'n slash e mantém você entretido e imerso.

História: Infelizmente, lords of shadow não cumpre bem o papel de jogo narrativo. A possibilidade de explorar mais profundamente o universo gótico de castlevania é desperdiçada pela priorização do gameplay frenético. É possível compreender isso pelo jogo ser de uma época onde jogos de ação estavam muito mais em alta, porém, é perceptível como, hoje em dia, o jogo envelheceu mal. Sua história é superficial e muitas vezes, com pontos desconexos, apresentando elementos que servem apenas para existir, mas que não possuem o menor pingo de relevância para a trama. No geral, sua trama existe, mas é superficial e descartável.

Castlevania: lords of shadow está muito longe de ser um jogo ruim, porém, está muito longe de ser um jogo bom. Sua gameplay consegue compensar seu roteiro fraco e seus personagens sem relevância, mas, os poucos momentos focados na história que o jogo apresenta, são lentos e difíceis de digerir. É recomendado ser um bom fã do nome castlevania pra jogar esse game e conseguir apreciá-lo. Para quem não é fã, é apenas um jogo de hack'n slash genérico.

honest to god wanted to give this a fair shot but its just so mind numbingly boring

i hate when people go "ugh this game isn't insert series title" but man this just isn't Castlevania if Gabriel didn't have the last name Belmont i'd think i was playing some off brand Lord of the Rings game

its a standard God of War clone but it forgets what made the old God of War games actually fun and that was the barbarian like combat but in this game you can't even pull off any of the combos you unlock because the enemies will break out of it and attack on the second hit because of how slow the whip is

it also adopts the "find item to upgrade health and magic" shit from GOW but it hides all of the items offscreen covered in the fucking ruined backgrounds i only found some of them because i had a guide open that told me yes that wall covered in shit that looks the same as everything else is actually a secret hallway that'll give you 1 of the 5 shards you need to gain like an extra hit worth of health

the boss fights also suck i made it to like the end of chapter 2 and you fight a titan that you have to climb like Shadow of the Colossus but in order to climb it you have to throw a rock that half the time you can't even see coming because the camera doesn't track it and after that fight is the Black Knight who again can only be hit twice before he uses an attack that can shave off half your health if it fully hits like what the fuck???

people who don't play Castlevania will probably enjoy this but if you're going to play a 3D action game vania then just play the PS2 Castlevanias because those at least look, feel and play like Castlevania

The combat handles absolutely beautifully once you get the hang of it, and new mechanics are added at just the right pace to keep things interesting. The environments and creature designs are just gorgeous, and so perfectly tailored to my specific tastes. I wasn't even paying attention to the story, really - just enjoying being able to exist in that world for a while.
I will say, I found the music lackluster. A banger soundtrack is important to me in a game like this, and a generic blockbuster orchestral score doesn't really do it for me.

This is my second attempt to play Castlevania: Lords of Shadow. I originally bought it when it launched in 2010 having been hyped by the launch trailer with Patrick Stewart and Robert Carlyle narrating. Its been 14 years since then and all I remember is not enjoying it much and eventually trading it in but nothing specific about it. A friend of mine bought it so we decided to play through it together as Castlevania fans, what could go wrong?

Everything about this game feels bad to play.

Let's start with the protagonist Gabriel Belmont, he has all the personality and emotional range of a slab of granite. Literally anything that happens gives him no reaction at all like the developers forgot to animate his face. A magic horse teleporting in next to him? No problem. Giant titan smashing out of the lake? Sure. Dead wife appearing in front of him? It's Tuesday. Not a flicker of acknowledgement of surprising events like an animated corpse. His voice actor Robert Carlyle is normally a great performer but it doesn't seem like he was given much direction here. Perhaps it's because voice acting is a very different skill? but it really sounds like he is just reading off a script. Perhaps I'm underselling him here and he is acting to the characters visually displayed emotions, which is absolutely nothing, so in fact an A+ performance.

I could overlook this if the game was fun to play and control Granite Belmont but that's actually the worst part, by a country mile. It's a 3D action game but has a fixed camera with a soft lock following the action. Because the game lacks personality as much as Mr. Granite it's essentially a God of War clone but it fails to understand the level design to make that enjoyable leaving large dead zones of the camera view constantly. The combat just feels terrible, It's slow but not deliberate. Attacks lack weight and impact yet everything is unresponsive at the same time. The controls are somewhat baffling in their design to compound this further. Roll is on L2 with the left analog stick, the right analog stick doesn't seem to be used at all as you can't control the camera. There is no manual lock on to attack enemies, just a soft lock that's easy to lose. It's feels so cumbersome, even after a few hours it still felt like we were learning the controls.

A second friend came by when we were playing and gave it a go and their only impression was "This doesn't feel good does it?"

You can buy more combos for your whip using experience gained through combat but none of them feel easy to pull off or actually useful in any way when you do. The whip completely lacks impact. Enemies will just interrupt you mid attack so most the time hit and run is the most effective strategy. It's Castlevania yet you get access to one sub weapon of a throwing knife and two magic spells of light and shadow. Light heals you, shadow increases your attack. It's...coloured auras in which you collect orbs from enemies with L3 or R3 depending which pool you want to refill. Getting access to this IP and only giving that as options feels so...derivative.

This complete lack of imagination extends to the level and enemy designs equally. Enemies are bland fantasy archetypes of werewolves, trolls, goblins, and spiders. We completed 14 levels in two chapters with several hours of play and barely saw anything else. This is a series known for animated armour, floating medusa heads, dancing ghosts, chimeras etc. How do you take the past games and boil them down to such uninteresting foes? The first main level after the tutorial fight was a swamp you slowly trudge through with some goblins. It's so painfully generic but it's not even done well or designed interestingly to make it fresh. It utterly lacks the panache and style of the series it's based on.

It feels like it's aged terribly going back to it, it has all the worst aspects of the PS3 era. Quick time events for finishing enemies or traversing with a circle going into another circle. Balancing to cross a beam and having to hold R2 if you are about to fall. The game also constantly takes control away from you like it's mansplaining everything feeling incredibly patronising. Constant tutorials, pop ups, camera sweeps. Just let me play the game! I know I can pick up items with R2, I've been playing for over 2 hours! It treats you like your memory is wiped every 15 minutes.

The game tries to be a large epic with high production values with epic music and voice acting yet there are large chunks of levels with no music at all but it's not atmospheric, just empty. What music there is is forgettable like a generic orchestral theme for a summer block buster but no punch or stand out beats. Like trailer music.

After several hours my friend and I just called it quits. Maybe it gets better further on? I am aware of the twist but after learning there were still 34 more levels we just didn't actually want to play anymore. We moved onto Space Marine after this as my friend hadn't played it and the quality difference on the same system was night and day. Full camera movement, easy fluid to use controls, and interestingly a better frame rate and clearer image quality. It really just emphasized all of this game's flaws.

The thing is, I'm sad about this. We wanted to like this, we wanted to beat it and play Lords of Shadow 2 to fill in some gaps in our Castlevania history and see Granite Belmont's story unfold. There isn't an original idea to be had here though and everything just feels so banal with it. Playing this feels like a PS3 game with all the negatives that sentence implies. It takes the worst aspects of gaming in that generation and merges them together but above all it's just forgettable.

Even Patrick Stewart can't save this.

+ I like Granite Slab's outfit.

- Awful camera, controls and combat.
- Bland level, skills and enemy designs.
- Gabriel has the personality of a plank of wood used in a button measuring contest.
- Everything feels so safe and by the numbers like designed by committee.

For some reason this game, having mildly entertaining combat mechanics pulled straight from the original God of War games (but done worse) decided that in addition to that it must be a Shadow of the Colossus game, but a very shitty and annoying one. That first Snow giant or whatever is such a terrible boss fight, and to encounter something as lame, unresponsive and frustrating as that after Ragnarok was like a whiplash.

I dumped the game, but still, some time later im willing to give the second game a chance. First one though, wow, what an incompetent rehash of games that came before. Performance is garbage too. This game actually embodies the worst tendency of the PS3/XBOX 360 generation games. Going full in on the graphical fidelity while totally abandoning performance as an important part of gaming experience. If you can't optimise it, own up to it and make it uglier! It's not like you're fooling anyone with those graphics when your frame rate is in a toilet. Damn.

"THAT WASN'T CASTLEVANIA!

THAT WAS JUST A GOD OF WAR RIPOFF!"

Nah, but in all seriousness, this game really highlights MercurySteam's strengths as a studio: insane art direction/presentation, and impressive spectacle. It's even got a pretty bonkers final twist in the story. It's nice to see them get their start as a studio, since they'd eventually take their talents and go on to do great things, like bring 2D Metroid out of a two decade-long coma.

Welp, that's all the good I can muster; Time to let out all my frustrations.

I can barely remember a single piece of music from this game. It's all generic orchestral mumbo-jumbo that you've heard literally anywhere else before. The only parts I remember are the ones that played over and over again, forcing me to realize that they frequently reused what few tracks they had in the first place. There are certain sections of the game where characters will spout the same voice clips at you ad nauseum. It got so bad that I had to disable the voices for those sections just to retain whatever sanity I had left. There's also an eternal "shaky cam", as if the whole game is being filmed by a shell-shocked war veteran. It's like that even when you're doing nothing.

This game just doesn't understand action combat. Enemies are damage sponges, even on the easiest difficulty. I think that's to encourage you to use the parry move, but enemies don't telegraph their attacks well enough to make that viable. Half the time I don't even know if I can parry a move or if it's considered unblockable. Even when I do pull the parry off, the extra damage feels minimal, and it has the visual impact of a fart with extra reverb. I'm not even sure it does that much more damage than hammering away at the buttons normally either. It's a god damn mess.

Puzzles are also strewn about, and they're either braindead busywork or outright nonsense. Even after you get a new power, its utility is marred by unintuitive controls, reliance on your limited light/dark magic meters, and unclear signposting on when or where they expect you to use it. One minute you'll be touching wall panels with the appropriate magic like it's paint-by-numbers, and then there'll be a FICTIONAL BOARD GAME in one chapter that's somewhat luck-based and has unclear rules, bringing your entire experience to a screeching halt.

This game also happens to approach replayability in the worst way possible with its "trials". After (and only after) you finish a chapter, a trial will be active the next time you play that chapter. They range from tedious tasks like "kill 50 goblins", to tasks with no room for error, like "defeat the ice titan in 1:30". The trial also won't be considered complete unless you go ahead and finish the chapter you're playing. You're allowed to leave via the world map and keep your upgrades when hunting for collectibles, no clue why the trials are treated differently. Completing these trials gets you...absolutely nothing! Well, nothing except a handful of achievements and a vague sense of regret. You don't even get more experience points for completing these, and there's no way you'll have every single combo bought after a single playthrough (the last few are prohibitively expensive). You also don't gain more EXP by playing on higher difficulties, which begs the question: Aside from 100% completion, what the hell is the point of doing all this crap?

The most damning stake in this game's coffin is that it just doesn't feel like "Castlevania". Lords of Shadow crosses over into medieval territory, and while a lot of its iconography runs adjacent to Castlevania (skeletons, reapers, goblins, etc), it's missing a very crucial element: gothic horror. Hell, there's no Dracula in this game whatsoever. Well, no Dracula until MercurySteam teased the next game in the post-credits scene. I hope the next game delivers on that bombshell, because this game already feels like a distant memory.

Played it for around 4 hours. I didn't find the combat that enjoyable, especially compared to other action games I really like such as DMC 5 or Bayonetta. It also doesn't feel like Castlevania at all, but even if you don't care about that, the story by itself is not even a little interesting.
The visuals were pretty nice tho, environnement design, lighting and the overall style of the game were pretty nice.
In the end, I just don't think that the game was for me. It would probably be more enjoyable for someone who likes God of War (the originals) style games.