If I had to describe Castlevania I would call it 'technically perfect'. The game is a conglomeration of God of War, Shadow of the Colossus, and Prince of Persia and it imitates them all near perfectly. Heck, one of the best things about Castlevania is its' combat system. Gabriel is able to easily flow from one combo to the next without a lot of down time. Plus there is a wide array of moves at his disposal that it is easy to play around with the combat system. I loved it. I had so much fun whipping enemies whenever the chance arose. I also found the secondary weapons to be highly useful. Dagger lost their usefulness pretty quickly, but I was constantly using the fairies and holy water an enemies. The crystal summon proved highly useful on many different occasions and finding crystal shards was easy enough that I didn't feel that I had to save the summons. I may not like the look of the summon but it was still nice to have.
Graphically the game is gorgeous. Many of the earlier levels really stand out with their lush green looking environments. It is a shame that later levels devolve into browns and grays just so they can have a gritty, wasteland look to them. The game is much too gorgeous to justify using those colors. Sadly the levels are littered with 'invisible walls'. I would constantly find an area that Gabriel should be able to jump to just to find that he couldn't. Why? Because someone said so. It was also a shame to see the earlier 'multi-pathed level' theme did not continue long into the game. That had me excited to explore the other path while revisiting levels for power-ups.
Now the game has two massive flaws in my humble opinion. The first is the story. Most of the story is told only through voiceover by Patrick Stewart. I never really got to know Gabriel. I never felt that Gabriel was as dark, angry, unforgiving, overworked, or devoid of compassion as Patrick Stewart implied. He did seem driven and little bit cocky. Heck it seemed to me that Gabriel was having fun during his quest. He didn't even seem to feel that badly about Claudia and I'm still not sure why she is in the game. The game should have spent more time with Gabriel. Maybe they could have gone Prince of Persia and had Gabriel talking to himself during the levels. That would have been a great way to get to know the guy. Plus, I never felt that Gabriel was the all-out murder machine that you were lead to believe he had become. Gabriel did his best to save people. He did ruthlessly slaughter Vampires, Werewolfs, Trolls, Goblins, Giant Spiders, Gremlins, etc. But any member of his Knighthood would have done the same thing. Those are unnatural creatures of darkness and therefore needed to be destroyed. It did not seem that Gabriel couldn't wait to slaughter everything in his path. That aspect was never shown.
I mean, the overall story is fine. Heaven and Earth has been separated and the only way to reunite them is to kill the Lords of Shadow and obtain their power. A nice bonus is the resurrection of Gabriel's wife. The big twist with Satan has zero impact since it tool away a fight I had been greatly looking forward to, the fight with Zobek. When somebody randomly shows up and says "I am actually the big bad guy of this game!" you kind of go "Oh. Okay." instead of being all "I cannot wait to destroy this guy. I've wanted to crush him the entire game!" You see the difference. There is only one hint of Satan and it is a very poor hint. The Witch that wants the blue rose says something about serving the 'Lord of the Angels' or something along those lines. But it is a throwaway comment at best. Besides, Satan isn't Lord of the Angels. His real name, Lucifer, means Son of the Morning. He thought he deserved to be God's equal without doing any of the work. For this was he cast out of Heaven and he took with him 1/3 of the Hosts of Heaven. Not exactly a lord of anything in the end.
The second major problem with this game? Oh you can probably guess this one. The stupid camera. Holy crap, how hard is it to hold that thing still. There is no reason for the camera to keep wiggling during gameplay. I had to build up a tolerance for the thing and even then it would still affect me. Heck, I want to get the DLC had some point but I don't want to have to deal with this dumb camera again.
Also I am so over fixed-camera games. This game would choose some of the worst angles making it very hard to see where I was going or even the enemies that I was fighting. Just give the camera back to the player and stop wiggling it. Do this and I would be very happy.
Despite these two flaws Castlevania is a very good game. I still had a lot of fun with it. I felt the opening dragged on a little bit, but after reaching the halfway point the game really took off with some interesting gameplay. So yes, I would recommend this game to anyone unless you suffer from major motion sickness.
Time for a new game then. Boy this game seemed to take forever.
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