Going from the original NES/GBA Castlevania games to this one is like leaving an abusive relationship. Don't get me wrong, it's still a very difficult game, but the challenge in the first 2/3 of the game is extremely fun and fair, and you're properly equipped to handle most of the extremely difficult things the game throws at you. However, the final few stages return to the abusive ways of the old Castlevania games with unfair enemy placements that require memorization and extremely long boss rushes that were just begging to be save scummed. Overall an S tier game in terms of gameplay, atmosphere, and graphics. It's a shame they never utilized the 8-directional whip again, because it seems like a wasted mechanic with regard to future games.

I suck at side scrollers, but this cutesy kid's game was way harder than it had any right being. I've never played more than like, ten minutes of a Mega Man game so I have no real baseline to compare this. The only thing I can say is the final level is extremely punishing because it makes you restart the entire thing, even if you die to the final boss, and the bosses don't have health bars, which is extremely annoying. Overall, a decent time killer and it's funny to see what's possibly Alucard as this deformed, grumpy little vampire prowling the modern day world.

It's important to give Konami the credit it's due, because this game blazed a trail in video game representation. Never before had a game put you in the shoes of an arthritic old man like this one. This is game 3 of my Castlevania chronological marathon. I can't tell if this is better or worse than Simon's Quest, but it's certainly not good. I grew up playing this on the GBA, it was my first Castlevania. Let's just say I'd hate to be a Castlevania fan in the late 80s, getting back to back stinkers like Simon's Quest and this. Dracula's Curse ironically must've been a blessing. I feel good having beaten this after 20+ years.

So I won't mark this review as a spoiler, but I'll mark where the spoilers start. I have three words for anyone who hasn't played this game yet: PLAY. THIS. GAME. There are a few ways to play it: on original hardware, that is, the xbox 360 or the ps3; on an emulator, like xenia or RPCS3 if you don't have an xbox 360 or future xbox releases; or, backwards compatible on an xbox one or xbox series x/s. I took the third option, and it ran just fine, though it did not have an unlocked frame rate or save states. The unfortunate truth is, you'll be stuck playing this on a controller rather than on PC.
If you know anything about my reviews, you know that I love to nitpick and don't throw the word "masterpiece" around lightly. This game is a masterpiece. The reason I give this game five stars is simple: The Darkness is a game that deserves high praise and is much greater than the sum of its parts. The plot of the story is average, the gameplay is subpar and has aged poorly but is still fun, and the graphics and presentation show their age quite a bit. However, this game contains peak SOVL. It's unfortunate that this came out in 2007, and as a result was overshadowed by titans gaming that released that same year such as Bioshock, CoD 4, Halo 3, and Mass Effect, among many others.
The graphics are a mixed bag. You can definitely tell this game was made for consoles in 2007. It's about the same level of quality as some of the other releases from 2007, but shows its age a bit more because it tries to go for a "realistic" look. The lighting makes the game a little frustrating, but overall it's nothing too bad. It perfectly captures the dingy atmosphere of mid 2000s New York City. That entire city is just one massive public restroom at the street level and below, and the art style shows that. There are moments of comedy seamlessly thrown in to make the city more lively and believable, which is something I appreciate. The strange ramblings of the locals, the idiosyncratic street performers, and the unlockable voicemails you can listen to when you collect certain letters around the city are hilarious and charming. They don't veer off into Saints Row 3 style wacky territory either, as these are things people in the real New York City would absolutely do because being cooped up in that hellhole does things to people. The layout of the city is also incredibly immersive. I really like how the game doesn't spell out where to go, you have to talk to people and call the city's information center in order to figure out where to go next. It reminds me of the immersive way Morrowind is designed, but on a much smaller scale and much more linear. This helps put you into the shoes of Jackie Estacado.
Unlike something like Silent Hill 2, which I've admitted has an excellent story and atmosphere but extremely boring gameplay, there's still a pretty fun game buried under the jank of the combat system in this game. The fact of the matter is, the gameplay simply hasn't aged well. There are things like auto-aim that will help ease the transition from PC to console if you're not used to playing with the controller, but the game takes a lot of getting used to. For one, the Darkness takes a while to figure out using. It's kind of immersive in that way, because Jackie is just learning how to use his powers as well, so it's like you're learning how to control the Darkness alongside him. That being said, you'll only start out with one or two abilities and will have to rely on the subpar shooting mechanics and unreliable guns. Staying in the darkness will recharge the Darkness, and, if you have all of your powers unlocked and maximum darkness level, you can wreak absolute havoc all over the place. Things like the darklings, which have terrible AI but can still do some pretty serious damage and turn off the lights in the rare occasion they actually work properly, help make the combat much more enjoyable with their fun banter and their chaotic nature. The darkness powers itself are really good as well, like the overpowered black hole, the stealthy creeping darkness, the darkness tendril that I just used for taking out lights, and the darkness guns I never use. Overall, the game is pretty fun but has some issues. For one, the puzzles are unintuitive when they show up, and the elements you need to solve the puzzles blend into the environment too much. Another thing is the fact that the game does have you fighting in open fields, which is incredibly frustrating because your powers just weren't designed for combat in open fields. Another final thing is the fact that your darkness powers get automatically put away when you run out and you have to manually bring them back. This is a simple button press, but can lead to you forgetting to bring them back and getting brutally killed by your enemies in like two shots.
The story (Big spoiler warning here):
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"JENNY IS DEAD, PAULIE BETRAY ME, I SO FED UP WITH THIS WORL"
- Tommy Wiseau in his breakout role as Jackie Estacado.
The plot is nothing to write home about. However, this is a video game, and video games have two advantages over movies: they're longer, and you directly control the character. It starts kind of in medias res, at the moment your boss and uncle Paulie betrays you. Eventually, the events leading up to Paulie's betrayal are revealed, and you grow more attached to Jackie and realize that the situation isn't really his fault. You also grow to become attached to his girlfriend as well, because in the beginning of the game there's a romantic scene where you just sit on the couch and have the opportunity to watch the entirety of To Kill A Mockingbird. You feel guilty for leaving her alone in her apartment, which leads to you feeling even guiltier when she is killed by Eddie Scrote - I mean Shrote, and you feel a bloodlust towards the villains. The villains themselves aren't really compelling, as they're very one dimensional, but this game does really know how to make you hate them and relish in their demise. There's also a psychological element to it, where you not only feel for Jackie but also the Darkness itself. The World War I levels show how the Darkness feels isolated and paranoid, and how Jackie's family has borne the curse for a very long time. There is some very disturbing imagery that gives you a good insight into just how bleak things are for both of these characters.
Overall, I wholeheartedly recommend this game and am looking forward to the second one.

Look, I know I nitpick a lot but I see the positive reviews for this game and I think to myself, have these people actually played this thing? I put a few hours into this but it got too unbearably frustrating to the point I just gave up on it, and that's saying something because I've powered through some hot garbage in my time on this site.
So my review of the mechanics and story will obviously be limited, but a few hours of this is enough to warrant dunking on this game to this degree.
The story had promise, and as I'm reading the cliffnotes it's pretty good. You have to read a lot of journal entries to get the real gist of it, but this is an extremely ambitious story for a shooter, even by today's standards. You wouldn't think they'd put a high drama about family strife and generational curses into a frenetic early 2000s horror themed first person shooter, but they did, and that's pretty cool.
The atmosphere is decent enough, but the entire game feels like traversing through hallway after hallway. It's very boring.
The shooting mechanics would be fine if they didn't feel so floaty and awful. The entire thing just reeks of "it's a horror game so let's make the shooting and combat feel like hot garbage". There are no health packs but enemies can and will instantly hit you and you can do very little to avoid damage because leapers move at the speed of light and other enemies practically have hitscan weapons, so you're in a constant state of save scumming. The enemies in general have this Dark Souls 2 level of hit tracking, where they can change direction mid-throw to hit you.
The guns do very little damage and something more substantial like the shotgun takes like fifteen minutes to reload. The only real viable gun that outclasses the rest is the Himalayan cannon, but even that gets annoying to use after a while.
You can't hit quickload once you're dead, you have to reload and then hit quickload after you've loaded back in. This wouldn't be an issue if the game weren't so unplayable.
The ectoplasm spell is really your only viable damage dealing spell in the beginning, yet still is inaccurate when it comes to the enemies that zip around and deals about as much damage as lightly farting on enemies. I'm sure there are more substantial weapons and spells later on in the game, and I'm sure the game gets more playable later on as Patrick gets more powerful, but overall I absolutely hated this.

This was a pretty good game for the Halloween season.
The thumb stick-based combat wasn't as bad as, say, Too Human, but I'm glad that game developers left the thumbsticks alone when it came to combat after a certain point. It was kind of annoying in this game, it was annoying in Too Human, and it was annoying in Metal Gear Rising with its left stick parrying mechanics.
The combat is overall very simplistic and is mostly in service to the puzzle based gameplay. Most of the time the puzzles involve strategically selecting weapons and power-ups to work around the challenges presented, such as not killing a certain type of enemy of killing every enemy within the time limit. These start off simple before getting brutally difficult in chapter 3.
You can tell this game had a fairly troubled development because the design is extremely linear and room to room rather than the more open pseudo-metroidvania of something like Resident Evil. It feels like it settled on the former because it didn't have the development time to create the latter, and that's fine by me. This game is great because it's short and sweet, a longer and more open experience would make it more of a slog.
The atmosphere is very cartoonish and aged well. The soundtrack is your standard goofy, spooky style of music with some absolute bangers like the main theme and the ballroom theme. The game is very funny as well. Even though this is an E rated game, it's filled with dirty jokes that would fly over a kid's head. The name of the game itself is a double entendre, and there are scenes like Cooper giving Amber the ointment to cure her disfigurement (if you played this part you know what I'm talking about). It's not all dirty though, there's plenty of slapstick, wordplay, and absurdity.
The reason I docked points from this game was that it was brutally difficult in chapter 3 and chapter 4, though chapter 4 was basically just the final boss. It was extremely frustrating, but luckily the difficulty drastically decreased in chapter 5 after beating the final boss, who was the last big hurdle to jump through before your victory lap, saving all the captives.
Overall, this is a pretty good game to play during spooky season. Would recommend, but only if you're up for an extremely difficult challenge towards the end.

Pretty decent Halo clone with a little Red Dead Revolver and other shooters thrown in there for good measure. It's not nearly as good as Halo, of course, but it's pretty fun and inoffensive overall. I enjoyed the atmosphere and licensed soundtrack, though it did take itself a little too seriously. The story was okay, though the good ending was kind of lame because you get no hoes. There are some good levels, and some pretty awful sections of the game like the mission where you are in the sun and your powers are nerfed beyond belief, or the mission where you drive a knockoff warthog from Halo that controls like complete garbage. The suicide bomber enemies are also fairly annoying because they can spawn right on top of you, the jumping is extremely floaty and difficult to control, and the bosses kind of suck because you only get the worst guns in the game to fight them and Jericho moves frustratingly slow in reaction to their moves.

As a certified zoomer, my dad's ps1 was my first console. On it, we had Spyro, Symphony of the Night, Neversoft's Spiderman, and MediEvil. I played all of them, but not MediEvil for some reason. I wish I had, because this is the kind of game that I would play the first few levels of over and over again as a kid because my child brain didn't have the IQ to get through harder levels. After playing this as an adult, I felt like I did as a kid all those years ago playing ps1. This game is really fun and makes me nostalgic despite having never played it before, though many of its mechanics haven't really aged well in some regards.
The atmosphere and soundtrack are impeccable, especially for the Halloween season. It's the perfect game to play with a cup of coffee, an open window to let in the crisp autumn air, and a pumpkin spice candle burning on the counter. This coziness is helped by its Tim Burton-esque art style and sense of humor. I'll bookend this with the story - it's nothing to write home about. It has a really funny premise and there are even some moments that I'd dare to call epic. It's satisfying seeing the former coward Daniel Fortesque getting over his mild disability of being dead and slowly accruing more power to defeat Zarok.
The levels themselves can be fairly hit or miss. Many of them are fun to explore and traverse, and have intuitive puzzles and level design, but there are some like the Ghost Ship and Asylum which can be infuriating.
I thought this game would be a lot harder than it actually ended up being, because the earlier sections were very difficult due to the combat system's tendency to feel really weird and awful. It's really hard to kill enemies without getting hit since they more or less ignore your strikes until they're dead, and don't usually stagger. The best way to get through the combat in the earlier parts of this game is to run around like a cokehead and slash at everything that moves. If you're anything like me and got the chalices the first time going through each level, you'd know about the magic sword that never loses its charge towards the end of the game that makes all of the combat trivially easy, and the fact that you have many lives if you max out your health bar (which is another fairly easy task if you got all the chalices). The camera is an absolute nightmare though, and the controls make platforming a pain. This is a remake in the school of remakes that are a litte too faithful to the original, similar to the Demon's Souls remake, and keep annoying and outdated mechanics from the original release while providing just a graphical overhaul and a few quality of life improvements like more life fountains around the levels and certain advantages against bosses.
Overall, this was a good time that wasn't as painful as I thought it would be judging by first impressions, and is an easy game to recommend if you're willing to deal with some outdated mechanics.

This game is a technically unstable piece of jank. A very intriguing and sometimes very fun technically unstable piece of jank. The dialog is cheesy, the story makes very little sense, the graphics are weirdly good but the poor performance and animations make it feel like it's held together by cardboard and duct tape, and the gameplay is extremely awkward. Yet, I can't help but love this game. It plays its absurd story completely straight, yet it teeters on the brink of self-awareness.
The story involves Simon, an American World War 1 soldier who's fighting alongside the British in the Battle of the Somme. They did, however, take a few liberties with the World War 1 setting. The Germans are cartoonishly evil, the weapons and technology verge into World War 2 era technology, and there's one other minor thing that might make me question the historical accuracy of this game just a bit: demons and vampires didn't spill out of hell to fight both the Germans and allied forces in World War 1. This game has you going from the trenches of the European theater to the belly of Hell itself. It goes from fighting some German mad scientist to killing Mephisto to save the vampires and humanity from the apocalypse. It's presented through very stiff and boring cutscenes, which have people speaking slowly over still images or characters that stand in the same place for a long period of time. There are also way too many cutscenes in the beginning of the game, when you're itching to get right into the action. I'll leave the discussion of the endings, all of which are stupid and awful, at the end of this review. An aside, Simon being a folksy southerner who says one-liners that reference other shooters or Evil Dead is a hilarious contrast with the grimdark World War 1 setting.
The graphics are decent for a game made in 2009, but if you don't turn off anti aliasing and VSync, the game will slow to a crawl if you use fully auto weapons. The loading times can take up to a full minute as well, which is absurd considering this game is almost 15 years old. That's all loading times. So every time you die, you're going to wait a minute to load your last save.
The gameplay is pretty weird. The first half of the game is basically a World War 2 shooter, with a few demons and a lot of zombies here and there. The difference between this and something like Medal of Honor, though, is Simon can take an absolute beating. All of the enemies go down pretty easily, but you are an absolute bullet sponge. This encourages you to play it more like Doom or Serious Sam with World War 1/2 weaponry, rather than playing conservatively and taking cover. Your health also regenerates much faster when you're in melee range of enemies. The melee system is not to be ignored either. Like in games such as Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, the kick is extremely powerful and can knock down entire squadrons of enemies. You can also use a bayonet or a shovel alongside a pistol, and throw any spare bayonets you may have to take out multiple people with one throw and get more fury. The combos give you a fury multiplier, which temporarily makes you more powerful by helping you do more damage, but hearing the vampire whisper in your ear that you're doing a good job at killing is a reward in itself. In the halfway point of the game, you get a gauntlet and vampire guns, making the WW2 guns more or less obsolete and turning the game into a more traditional shooter with magic in your off-hand and a powerful gun in your main hand. The game is much better after this halfway point, though the final level is awful. There are also vehicle sections, some of which coincide with bosses. The mech is pretty fun to control, basically giving you a larger and more cumbersome version of yourself with unlimited rockets and ammo. The dragon is pretty fun as well, though he can be annoying to control and feels like driving a buggy and slow fighter jet. The bosses are pretty good for an FPS game as well. This isn't really a compliment to the bosses, rather a condemnation of most FPS bosses. The only boss I could say was bad was the final boss. He was pretty easy, he just took forever to kill to the point where I thought I was doing something wrong because his health bar was draining very slowly.
The endings are all pretty bad. None of them have you triumphantly defeating the bad guys. I don't think an ending needs to be happy for it to be a good ending, but this is a game about fighting German hell wizards and ancient demons with guns and magic. It's unabashedly stupid, which I love, but needs to have a triumphant ending like other shooters.
The easy ending has you wake up as if from a dream, like nothing happened.
The normal ending is one of the few video game endings where the final boss says "join me!" (as final bosses are wont to do) and you actually join him. Simon becomes a general for Mephisto and waits 100 years to fight the demons again in 2016. I guess this game must be historically accurate, because 2016 is when the world started to go insane. I guess the demonic war he was speaking of was much more subtle than in the first game.
The hard ending is similar to the normal ending, except he kills Mephisto and assumes control of the demons himself.
The normal and hard endings are much better than the easy mode ending, though I was disappointed that he turned evil at the end of them. If it's any consolation though, Simon's demon form looks absolutely badass.

You know, after playing this, I get the nagging feeling that this game isn't very Christian. I still enjoyed it though, it was pretty fun.
The presentation is some of the best you can get for a high-budget AAA game from 2010, during the late middle years of the xbox 360 and ps3's life cycle. Of course, it has a lot of the hallmarks of late 2000s/early 2010s graphics, such as a fairly monochrome color palate and cartoonish looking gore. A lot of these gorier games like Dante's Inferno and Darksiders had very inky looking blood and cartoonish gore, making it hard for the game to really feel Visceral (heh). The graphics and art are absolutely breathtaking though, immersing you in these hellish landscapes and taking you through the progressively more twisted realm of the underworld. The soundtrack is your average "insert epic operatic and orchestral music here" soundtrack, with a few standouts. The music that plays when you enter the river styx is excellent, almost reminiscent of Nier Replicant in its haunting beauty. Everything else in the soundtrack is just like the gameplay, more or less a bland knockoff of God of War.
The story is silly. I've studied theology for a while, but I'm not going to go into the intricacies of why this game might not be very theologically accurate. I'm not exactly playing this to bone up on the finer points of soteriology, as that would be like reading a McDonald's menu to familiarize yourself with the finer points of French cuisine. To be fair, the original Divine Comedy wasn't exactly theologically accurate either. Without indulging in sectarian infighting - I'm pretty sure there are not Greek mythological figures currently in Hell as Dante says there are. The story is an average over the top fan fiction about the Divine Comedy. Instead of a timid, mild-mannered medieval poet, Dante is instead a sinful crusading gigachad whose sheer powered overcame Death himself, reducing him to a quivering soy caricature of himself. Speaking of - Dante kills some very important people. Do people still die after Dante killed Death? The game never answered that. There are also instances when Dante kills (but isn't shown absolving) certain bosses, like Marc Antony and Cleopatra. Where do they go after they die again? Is there a mega-Hell that they have to go to now? Did Lucifer drop Hell 2? The story also has this strangeness to it, where it seems like the denizens of Hell are far too interested in the fact that Dante cheated on his wife and she sold her soul to the devil as a wager that he'd be faithful. Why would she do this? I have no idea. Dante basically has to battle through Hell to defeat his wife's boyfriend and send her to heaven. That's another thing that's funny about this story - Dante can absolve people of their sins. After all, it is written in the Bible: "Dante is the way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh unto the Father but by him."
The gameplay is more or less your standard God of War clone. The enemies range from unremarkable to poorly designed, like the guy who spins around and can only be hit by being parried or through a charged cross attack (I did a holy playthrough). This would be all well and good, but he grinds the game to a halt since he's an absolute damage sponge with an irregular attack pattern, so you have to dedicate an inordinate amount of time to chasing him down to intentionally put yourself in his line of attack so you can parry him. The holy powers are also completely overpowered. You're basically invincible to enemies in the later stages of the game, because of the sheer amount of health regeneration and protection you're given. Plus, the cross is a powerful weapon that works at both close and long range. The platforming in this game is surprisingly competent. There are plenty of fun spectacles to platform through, though some of the instant death pitfalls and puzzles they put in this game are downright annoying. Especially the puzzles, since they don't have a lot of environment tells to help you solve them or even indicate that a puzzle is there to begin with. The bosses, for the most part, are also very good. The one exception is the final boss Lucifer. He has three phases (well, more like two and a half) and his second phase takes like ten minute to whittle down. This man's health bar is obscenely long, to the point where I wondered if I was doing something wrong.
Overall, Dante's Inferno is worth playing if you're into the whole God of War clone thing and are looking for more games like it. I know I was, considering how soulslike mechanics have infected the action game genre to an annoying extent. I want to zip around doing crazy combos, not control a sluggish character through a decaying world for the four hundredth time in a row. It was cool the first few times when FromSoft did it, but it's getting old.