Drac is back. Or at least, he never really went away. That's the gist of the story behind 3D action/adventure game Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2, the concluding part of a trilogy that's had so many twists and turns, the story so far has to be summed up via a nigh on ten minute (if rather pretty) video at the start of the game. Still, in the days when even a vague story seems to be too much to ask of some games, it's nice to see a developer going to such lengths to help ease new players in.
What's it all about in a nutshell? Well, Dracula, as you may imagine for the prince of the damned, has a somewhat confusing family tree. Unbeknownst to himself, Drac sired a son, who grew up, and grew angry, before deciding setting out on a quest to kill his own father, as so many teenagers do. Entering into a battle with the intruder, Dracula ended up accidentally killing his own son (as he didn't know who it was), before desperately trying to resurrect him with his own blood. That turned his son into another (good) vampire called Alucard, and then - like an episode of Jeremy Kyle - his son eventually showed up at Drac's castle to put an end to the big bad vampire once and for all. Spiky whip through the heart, Drac was dead, and all was at peace with the world.
But as it turns out, much like magic dragons, vampires live forever too - even after having taken a stake through the heart. Now having returned from his several hundred year slumber, he reawakens to find the world rather different to how he left it. With his spectacular Gothic castle having been mostly redeveloped into a bustling, modern day city, complete with cars, beggars, and a bloke voiced by Patrick Stewart, it's a bit of a mixed up landscape to say the least. With Satan threatening a comeback, and Dracula starting to get a bit fed up of living forever the time has come, he decides, to find a way out of his immortal contract. Luckily for him, Patrick Stewart just happens to know just such a way.
Oh, and Dracula can also now travel through time with the help of a mystical white wolf, who shows up whenever Drac rubs a medallion, and leads him through a blood filled tunnel to the past/future.
Ooh, moody.
And so, the stage is set for a rather strange adventure that, while it spends ten minutes setting up its story, doesn't actually seem to push it all that much throughout. While there are plenty of cutscenes to keep things moving along, neither the plot itself, nor the characters themselves, seem to be as gripping as the hours of cutscenes would warrant.
While previous games have been rather open, exploration based affairs, Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 is much more restrictive. For the most part, you'll be hurried along from one cutscene to the next, in an adventure that's over 20 hours long, but of which you'll only be able to play for a few minutes at a time before triggering yet another cutscene.
In fact, things usually follow a pretty standard formula. You'll finish one cutscene, and be free to explore, stepping forwards, maybe turning a corner, or if you're particularly lucky, having to scale some sort of elaborate scaffolding, before ending up in a battle with a load of demonic baddies. A case of button mashing, these battles aren't the most exciting things you'll ever do, but they're all that stand between you and another cutscene to move the story forwards. Beat the baddies, and the next cutscene will trigger, at which point it's a case of rinse and repeat.
Rather than the exploration, for the most part it's the battles that Lords of Shadow 2 pushes as its life blood - the only problem is, they aren't really all that much fun. With three potential weapons at your fingertips, you at least have a decent choice of tools to choose from - but you can't actually use them all freely. Instead, your main weapon is a whip made out of blood (what else), which you can use to give the baddies a good lashing by hammering X and Y (on the Xbox 360), but which can seem depressingly ineffectual at times. Frustratingly, no matter how many hits you're raining down on your enemies, and no matter how much punishment you're dishing out, every single enemy in the game will, after a matter of mere seconds, simply start shrugging off your attacks. Rather than flinching in pain as they were, they'll turn, and start to attack, even through your angry whip barrage. While it may seem like a minor issue, it soon becomes a major annoyance in the game, as no matter how well you're doing, no matter how great a combo you're building up, the enemies will all, eventually, decide they can't be bothered sitting around losing any more, and cheat to get a cheap shot in. And that makes building up any major combos very hard.
The void sword - good luck getting to use this
Than in itself may not be too much of an issue, if taking damage from enemies wasn't much of a problem, and if combos solved no real purpose, but sadly neither is true. In fact, practically the only way to have access to your two other weapons - the void sword, and the chaos claws - is to build up a combo, something which is increasingly hard as the game strips away your ability to keep your foes at arm's length, regardless of skill. Some enemies will drop the orbs that power up these weapons anyway - but the majority don't. What's an even bigger issue is that the Void Sword is one of the only real ways for you to recover any health. Use it in battle, and for every hit you make, you'll gain some health back. Yet what sounds like a great help to novice players who're just learning their way around the game, is actually something that's the almost exclusive property of the Lords of Shadow masters. If you can't build a combo, then say goodbye to regular use of the Void Sword.
But beyond the frustrating battles, the other big problem with Lords of Shadow 2 is that it tries its best to give the illusion of being linear. It isn't actually all that linear, with an entire castle to explore to your heart's content - but it's so hard to get to actually go and explore the castle, without accidentally triggering a cutscene, which ends with you a few miles away from where you started, that you may not realise there's anything beyond the route the game tries to force you down. And that's a real shame, because the areas the developers, Mercury Steam, have created are absolutely gorgeous. Having clearly spent a small fortune developing the most spectacular gothic fortress you've ever seen, Drac's lair is nothing short of amazing. And it's a place you'll want to explore, yet the game does its best to try and steer you away from any exploration whenever it can.
There are other issues under the surface, too. While Dracula may look good, he's not exactly the most well rounded of characters, with some disappointingly weak voice acting, especially considering the cast. It's a game that relies far too much on shock value, too, seemingly oblivious to the fact that every other "mature" game has been trying its best to shock us for the past few years, so the "torture porn" approach only generates eye rolling.
One early, particularly unsettling scene, sees Dracula (oddly controlled from a first person perspective) having to rejuvenate himself, by sucking the blood of a family of innocents. Trapped in a room with the prince of darkness, who's desperate for blood, the family, a mom, a dad, and a young daughter, cower, and scream in hysterics as they beg Dracula to leave them alone - but with nowhere to go, they're cornered. Moving towards them, you're practically ordered to press B to end them - because if you don't, you end up dying anyway, as we found out. Press B, and you'll get an entirely unnecessary Drac's eye view of slicing the father's throat open, as blood gushes everywhere, while the mom and child go into even greater hysterics about what they've just witnessed. Cowering on the floor, the mom tries desperately to protect her daughter, but Drac, despite being desperate for blood, has apparently decided to ignore the guy's crimson, and instead turns his attention to the mother. Grabbing her around the throat, and lifting her off the floor, before sinking his teeth into her throat, he proceeds to literally suck the life out of her. Her terrified and tortured face filling the screen, you can only watch as it transforms from a living person to a cadaver, with grey, shrunken skin. (If you're interested, you can find the scene in question here)
While other sites have ridiculously labelled the scene as being a rape, or at the very least a sexual assault, it does raise a bigger question - is this really what we want from our games? Is this really the only way to make people "feel"? It's not the only time we see ridiculously over the top gore, either - when defeating enemies, you have a choice between continuing to beat them up (which takes an inexplicably long time), or pressing B to "finish them", at which point Dracula will saunter over, and sink his teeth into their throat, which inexplicably causes them to spontaneously combust in a shower of gore so ridiculously over the top, it actually fills the entire screen with blood, guts, and entrails.
The modern day sections offer a contrast.
Yet even putting issues about the content aside, so much of what Castlevania does seems to be either ill thought out, or trying to cram too many things in, to the point where it just ends up frustrating. As a perfect example, right at the start of the game, you'll be scaling a giant golem, jumping from barely visible peg to barely visible peg, as you try to find your way to the top. Oh, and because just trying to spot where to go on the thing isn't hard enough, there's a giant flying golden bloke firing arrows at you every few seconds (literally), just to keep you even more on your toes than you already are. And then, because that too isn't enough, you're expected to try and time your jump through a giant rotating blade that'll end you if it even so much as clips you. So not only do you have to dodge the arrows, not only can you not even really see where you're going, and not only do you sometimes have to press A to jump between hand holds, and sometimes you don't, you have to time your jumps perfectly too. In a game where we actually got lost during the tutorial, and where there are so many sub-weapons and abilities, all controlled by pressing various sequences of the d-pad and L or R buttons, Lords of Shadow 2 would have really benefited from some refocusing.
By adding in all these extra layers of complexity, Castlevania's effectively pushed the boat out too far. Ferrying you along from one cutscene to the next, throwing you into battles against unfair enemies, and seemingly doing its best to steer you away from the game's most appealing aspect - exploring its giant castle - Lords of Shadow 2 is a textbook case of style over substance. It looks amazing - it's just a shame it doesn't play that way too.
Format Reviewed: Xbox 360
