Castlevania: Curse of Darkness

Breakable lanterns? Check. Floating Medusa heads? Check. Fancy lad with lustrous hair? Check. Konami’s latest bid to bring the long-running 2D series Castlevania into the 3D realm proves to be a more faithful (and more successful) attempt than previous endeavors – but that’s not saying a whole helluva lot. In the latest rise against Dracula, Devil Forgemaster Hector is your new goody-two-shoes of choice, giving you new abilities to create sidekick demons called Innocent Devils (or IDs).

This new feature in the otherwise super straightforward hack, double-jump ‘n’ slash gameplay gives Castlevania some much-needed kick. Just think of your IDs as skills that need to be unlocked in order to access new areas of Castlevania’s sprawling series of (weirdly bland) dungeons, castle corridors, and outer pathways.

You’ll also be able to level up your IDs on varying skill-set trees that will determine if they’ll adopt more strength-based or magic-based abilities. And this is important as some of your demons need very specifi c skills for certain feats. How you learn which does what or how to get where you need to go is rather fuzzy and ill-defi ned, which leads to frustration. And all that backtracking might’ve fl oated back in the day, but now it just feels repetitive and tedious.

But despite some serious lack of refi nement in menus, interfaces, and a rough overall presentation, you’ll still fi nd yourself devil-and/or weapon-forging your way long past the point you probably should for a game that’s this rough. But that’s part of Castlevania’s charm –luckily some of it survived the 3D transition.