This entry should appear to coincide with the release of my video, so you should be able to get from one to the other without a hitch. Unfortunately, this particular video will mark the release of my first video where my EasyCap has begun its own descent into madness... The audio is messed up on it, it takes about 6 minutes to stabilize, rather than cut in and out and then after an hour or so it has another 6 minute period of destabilization. I believe my course of action will be to get a replacement, and then I will begin moving up until I snag a useful HD capture device. Ahhh... The future.
In any case, back on topic! I didn't actually play any of the first Lords of Shadow game, but I did take a gander at the demo for the second game (Mirror of Fate) in this particular series of Castlevania games. I know that Patrick Stewart voiced a major character in the first game, and while that does make me want to look into it, at least for the cutscenes, hah, this demo of the second game has sort of turned me off to the series as a whole.
Castlevania has always been one of those series that I've wanted to get into, but playing this has taught me that I should go with the main series.
Supposedly the Lords of Shadow games are a reboot to the series, and I don't know whether or not I like that. Hideo Kojima (of MGS fame) helped work on the series when it first began and due to his influence, I'm sure you'll realize it's got a lot of cinematic qualities to it. Unfortunately, a lot of the time cinematic qualities don't translate very well into good game design, and this particular game is no exception. Don't get me wrong, it's very pretty and the voice acting is pretty decent, but in my humble opinion, graphics should be far less important than gameplay. This game probably did not take that into account. There's only one part of the demo that has odd graphics, and that's the FMV at the end, wherein who I believe to be Alucard and his blade get exceptionally pixelated and glitchy looking. Other than that, the game maintains the same level of quality in the looks department.
The soundtrack is also somewhat gothic-inspired, which I am glad for. It's what you would expect from a game in the Castlevania mythos. There are far too many games nowadays that employ electronic or, far more likely, dubstep, simply because that is what is en vogue, even if it doesn't suit the source material AT ALL. I apologize that the sound quality from the capture is a little weird, especially for the beginning.
The game however, is more about the combat than anything else, so why don't we take a look at that. Since it's a Castlevania game, you naturally use a whip (SPOILERS :
Blocking on time with an enemy's attack (read: parrying), is essential to combat, and thus one of the biggest flaws in the game. Remember how I said that cinematic qualities don't necessarily translate into a good game? In the case of parrying, which is essential to combat, there is a slow-mo couple of seconds at impact, and a large, flashy, spark-spraying splash each and every time it occurs, which is admittedly VERY OFTEN. It's not so much the slow motion, which removes you from the moment that's bothersome, it's actually the shower of sparks. You can literally see nothing around you every time you parry, which makes the game very difficult. It's very difficult to die since you can use the void sword and also suck the blood out of your enemies, but the way the camera is positioned, so that it only cares about you and not your enemies, makes the shower of sparks INCREDIBLY problematic.
Enemies for the most part do not care whether or not you are hitting them, they do not go into stun states about 90% of the time you are wailing on them unless you have parried them already. If they are preparing an unblockable strike you can launch them though. Not only does parrying get in the way of viewing the action, but more often than not, the attacks that you can do by holding either the horizontal or vertical attack buttons (Think Soul Calibur) also make it relatively impossible to see. Being flashy does not necessarily make a good game, and I wish more developers would realize this.
The game makes use of quick time events (QTEs) basically any time it can, often with no real reason at all. Every time you beat an enemy to near-death and try to suck their blood, you have to do a QTE, which honestly makes no sense at all. On top of that, to finish a QTE, you can hit just about any button on the controller, and the animation for them, which consists of two circles merging, basically takes up the entire screen, so there is little to no skill involved at all. Both things involving QTEs I saw no reason for at all in the demo. When you suck an enemy's blood, none of the other enemies bother you, so it's not like you need to worry about that. The other time was hanging off the automaton's arm. I suppose in this case they were going for a Shadow of the Colossus situation, but the fact that the QTE occurs after the impact, when you are literally just hanging there doing nothing and nothing is trying to dislodge you makes very little logical sense to me.
In combat, enemies can use unblockable attacks, which you must get away from. What angered me about this is that not only do all of the regular enemies' unblockable attacks have their own animations, but the developers also found it necessary to draw gigantic circles on the weapons of the enemies so that you know when they're going to attack. I feel that that is also unnecessary, since you can clearly tell when an enemy is about to launch an unblockable. The devs seem to be trying to offer you WAY MORE HELP THAN IS NEEDED.
Not only do they give you more help than necessary when in combat, there's also way too many hints during traversal segments. After the initial one, anything you can climb on is a radioactive looking glowing nipple. ON TOP OF THAT, there's constantly a prompt for the "Show path" button, which then places a glowing circle on top of each radioactive nipple. Then, ON TOP OF THAT, as if it were necessary, if there's somewhere you need to go that doesn't have a nipple, a cloud of bats will fly around it. That's too many things to show players what they should be doing.
There's also a long section where you traverse the automaton while the angel-looking fellow shoots at you. You need to use his arrows to break bolts on the armor of the giant automaton, and the game will NEVER stop telling you what to do. The thing that absolutely infuriates me about this particular section is that it shows you before you get there during a scripted event what you need to do, by essentially doing it for you, but then the camera zooms in after to each of the exact same pieces, like you couldn't figure it out. After you break them, it zooms into WHERE YOU BROKE THEM. YES, I FUCKING KNOW, I JUST DID THAT. It then does that EXACT SAME THING each time one of these events occur, as if you were mentally deficient and couldn't figure out what to do, even though you just did it thirty seconds ago.
There's also sections where you need to rip something off the automaton, and while it glows radioactive yellow, words that take up something like 20% of the available screen space show you, with a diagram of the proper button no less, that you NEED TO RIP IT OFF. YES, I GOT THAT.
I have never played a game where it seemed like the developers were moreso than holding my hand, telling me straight to my face that I was a fucking moron, and they were gonna help me through this trying time. I was looking forward to trying out Lords of Shadow, but I have been so very sufficiently turned off by this demo, that I will probably never partake in the actual game. I hate when people say games have gotten harder over the years, when the opposite is clearly true. If you think games are getting harder, then the team behind LoS2 are the developers for you!
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