If memory serves, we quite liked Castlevania: Lords of Shadow in 2010. It seems like an eternity but the wait for the game’s sequel is finally at hand. To recap, during the course of the prior Lords of Shadow game, the protagonist, Gabriel Belmont, had been turned into Dracula, or Dracul, or Drac, or D. Depends on how well you know him (according to Eddie Izzard, anyhow). Despite his death at the end of Mirror of Fate at the hands of his son and grandson, he somehow got better, and the story now continues in Lords of Shadow 2. Is this game meaty and juicy enough for you to sink your teeth into, or is it a dirty neck that’s likely to leave a bad taste in your mouth? I sharpen my fangs and find out.
Storywise, Lords of Shadow 2 is a tad on the obtuse side. After a lengthy tutorial (that even featurs a painful boss fight at the end), an animated intro catches you up in the happenings of the Belmont family. The short and tall is that our protagonist, Dracula (nee Gabriel Belmont), decided to sleep through the next few centuries. Being a dark prince must be tiring. He wakes up in the present day, a shadow of his former evil self. Immortality seems to be a bit of a bitch. Zobek, the Angel of Death, warns Gabrie…err…Drac that Satan is rallying his acolytes in a bid to destroy the world, and enlists Drac to be the pothole on Satan’s road to success. In exchange, Zobek will give Dracula what seeks more than anything else. Money? Jewels? Or the Treasure of the Sierra Madre? Only playing the game will tell. Interspersed with the game’s present day story are bits of story featuring Dracula’s castle from the past. The latter is the vehicle used to tell the unfortunate story of the Belmont clan, and also serves to show how Drac slowly regains his lost powers. A couple of thousand years will do that to a guy.
Be it past or present, Dracula’s main attack weapons stay constant: your choices are void sword and chaos claws. The latter can hits with such might that your enemies burst like balloons filled with blood. It’s quite gruesome, on the level of God of War. In fact, you’ll find that much of the game is like God of War. You can level up your attacks and powers from menus that are styled like pages from a book. If you’re familiar with the first Lords of Shadow game, it’s an almost identical system. It’s a fitting analogy, though, considering there’s enough to see, do, and collect in LoS2 to fit into a weighty tome heavy enough to kill.
Like God of War, much of the game’s action relies on Quick Time Events. You’ll see them come into play when you want to drink enemy blood, or reach for that life-saving ledge as you’re about to fall to your death, or deliver the (hopefully) killing blow during a boss fight, or while avoiding a deadly cinematic experience, or…well, they’re everywhere. QTEs are to video games what glitter is to crafts. Delightfully, and a first for me, you can select to turn the blasted things off and play without QTEs. I did this, and found my experience much improved. I can’t recall one person who ever said that QTEs ever improved a game except by its removal. QTEs are the lazy developer’s way of trying to introduce tension into the cut scene action, but all it does is inject frustration into the gamer. But that’s a rant for another day.
If you decide to leave your QTEs in place, you’ll find that some boss fights are insanely irritating and cheap. You’ll wither down their health to a sliver, but missing the split-second finishing move QTE and they get back half their health back and you have to repeat the process. I think we’ve been a little spoiled by the first game, but the bosses, as grotesque as they are, are somehow less imposing than you’d expect. No sense of awe where you wonder to yourself “how on earth will I beat this blasted thing?” In Lords of Shadow 2, bosses seem like more like a formality. In fact, they’re almost laughably predictable in terms of where and when they’ll show up. In a “seen one gorgon, seen them all” kind of way, the monster design in LoS2 is unfortunately lacking. You’d think Satan could make his bestiary a little more frightening. Or diverse. There is not much variation in the way you dispatch these bosses: attack a few times, dodge out, and then back in for a few more hits before dodging again. And then wash, rinse, and repeat the entire procedure until you miss the QTE at the end.
As in the first game, there is much lore about the world of Castlevania to be found, usually on the bodies of dead knights. Where ELSE do you find lore? The back stories and bits of information are fascinating to read, and fleshes out the world quite nicely. It’s a pity, then, that the font choice and colour, while appropriate for a Castlevania game, makes the text rather difficult to read, especially on a menu that keeps changing colour.
I need to stop and talk a bit about the stealth sections for a bit. You encounter the first one shortly after the tutorial, and learn that Dracula is somewhat less badass than you’d have expected. In these sections, you turn into a rat and use the shadows to sneak past enemies, or use a bat swarm to distract heavily armed and armoured brutes. Considering the weapons at your disposal, it’s not believable that Drac is unable to take out these fellows, especially since Drac is shown moments later taking out goliath stone monstrosities with apparent ease. Another section involves playing a game of cat and mouse in maze with a foul creature who takes umbrage every time you rustle any leaves underfoot. With checkpoints few and far between, any botched attempts take you back to the start. While some might see these stealth sections as a change in pace to the fight scenes, I found them irritating, irrelevant, and somewhat meaningless. They certainly add nothing more than further irritation to a game that will already have irritable players.
Battles aside, there’s a fair amount of emphasis on exploration to find various crystals that boost your health and magic. It’s nice to get a break and be rewarded for looking around, but the camera doesn’t always make it easy, especially if you’re in a form other than “human”. Dracula’s health does not regenerate without some form of blood to suck, so any injuries you incur during the exploration of the environment will slowly kill you, bringing you that much closer to the last checkpoint again. If you don’t have much life, the one or two falls will result in your starting from the beginning of the checkpoint, and not from where you fell. That’s a tad irritating and will lead to many retries. Restarting a checkpoint leaves you with half of your life bar full so you’re at a disadvantage from the get-go.
All’s not bad with the game, though. There’s a stellar voice cast that curiously enough does NOT feature Nolan North. Robert Carlyle (Rumpelstiltskin from Once Upon a Time and Dr Nicholas Rush from Stargate Universe) plays Dracula, while Sir Patrick “Jean-Luc Picard” Stewart plays Zobek. Richard “Robb Stark” Madden plays Dracula’s son, Alucard, and Natascha McElhone reprises her role as Gabriel’s wife, Marie.
Overall, the game’s not awful, but not the kind of masterpiece of gaming that the original Lords of Shadow was. It’s not even as good as Mirror of Fate, really. It’s sad that voices aside, so much of the game is just mediocre. However, given the troubles that the game went through in development, it’s a surprise that it’s actually as coherent as it is, and still playable. About the smartest thing this game has is the ability to turn off QTEs, and for that I’ll be forever grateful.
Final Score: 6 Blood Sucking Prawns out of 10
Detailed Information:
Developer: MercurySteam
Publisher: Konami
Distributor: Ster Kinekor
Platforms: PS3 (reviewed), Xbox360, Windows
Age Rating: 16
Website: http://www.konami-castlevania.com/