Gonna be honest here if you see someone say that MercurySteam killed the Castlevania IP their mostly likely talking out their ass; if anything it's just Konami being Konami

Now as a reboot to the Castlevania IP I think it works pretty well; yeah it's not beat for beat the same story but that's what a reboot is, look at all the different Ninja Turtles reboots you don't see people complaining that they don't stay "respectful to the source material". Besides the OG lore was a convoluted mess at the time so I don't blame them for wanting a fresh start.

The game's biggest strength is its presentation, this game is nearly 12 years old and it still looks incredible with amazing art direction, well-done writing, and a pretty good voice cast with the one standing out the most being Patrick Stewart.

but the actual gameplay is just whatever, it's not awful but around the time when a lot of games tried the "like God of War/DMC but" style of gameplay very few actually we able to stand out, but even then more blatant games like Dantas Inferno or X-Men Origins Wolverine that I've had more fun with then this game. I think my biggest problem with this game and the reason I don't like the combat that much is the fact that this game is nearly 27 hours long.
That is way too much time for any hack and slash game let alone a game with very shallow combat that can't support that length of gameplay. Oh yeah this game also has actual rip-off Shadow of the Colossus boss fights, and they are really really tedious and not fun, granted there are only 3 in the whole game but none of them gave you this powerful feeling of killing a giant as it does in SOTC; here it's just climb up to the top with our janky platforming and break the big glowy thing and that's it.

I still think this is probably the best Castlevania will ever get in 3D which is a damn shame because I feel if done better than this it could be fantastic.