Castlevania: Curse of Darkness

System: Playstation 2
Release Date: 2005
Published By: Konami
Reviewed by: Darien
Rating:

Another game that's longer than it is fun. Castlevania: Curse of Darkness starts out enjoyable, and seems as though it provides a good amount of play depth, but becomes highly repetitive before very long. The number of distinct monsters is not great, and the stucture of the encounters is extremely lazy. Rooms will generally have a small number of monsters in them, with more monsters of the same type spawning as those are killed. Battles tend to degenerate into button-mashing festivals; crowded, easy, and indistinct is a good description for it.

I cannot recall offhand the last video game with a villain this ridiculous. Isaac is sort of a gay marionette raver, see. And he has bad dialogue delivered badly by a bad actor, but that's not unusual for this game. After the revolutionary cinematics in Lament of Innocence - good actors delivering well-written lines and carefully-animated models that actually seem to act - we get this sort of primordial cinematic soup. The only decent actor or interesting character in the entire game is Saint Germaine, though there are a few others who aren't completely awful.

Storywise, the game isn't predictable so much as irrelevant. There's not really any particular sense of what's going on, and you basically just run through monster vault after monster vault mashing buttons waiting for the next time for Saint Germaine to beam down and speak vague doom pronouncements. Much ado is made about the game's many varied environments, but it amounts to nothing in the end. This game may very well not be set all inside one big gothic castle, but there's no freedom of movement or exploration to be done. What I mean is, the forest is divided into nice rectangular rooms at right-angles to each other just like if it were a castle. I wonder if it grew like that or if Vallachia has some guy on retainer who maintains it that way.

The weapons seem fun at first, but there's really very little difference among them, and the method of obtaining them is thrillingly unfun. That's right, boredom fans, once again we have to collect bits of metal and make weapons out of them! Please, I beg of you; find me just one person who actually enjoys it when he finds a treasure in a secret room and it turns out to be "iron ore." Just one person who thinks that's more fun than finding a magic sword. Then I can kill him and I'll feel revenged upon eight years of video games forcing that shit down my throat.

Graphically, the game is not up to the standard set by Lament of Innocence. The models don't move smoothly or naturally and exhibit a good deal of aliasing, while the textures, unlike Lament's lively and detailed gothic designs, probably have filenames like "brown1," "brown2," and "brownmud." The sound (voice acting excepted) is tolerable but not at all exciting, and the score is bland.

Oh, before I forget, there's also some oddball catch-em-all mechanic about evolving little demon dudes to fight for you, but it's not very interesting.

Overall, what we're looking at here is a game that has high ambitions but weak execution. Every element here (other than the bits of goddamn metal) could be fun, but needs more work. And somebody needs to get his head reseated before making another game set in the eighteenth century starring a hardcore metal fan and a raver. I'm fairly sure they hadn't been invented yet by that point, but maybe that's just because nobody had found enough iron ores.

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