Playing with three or four friends allows you to be slightly more reckless and carefree and without the looming fear of some overpowered Frankenstein’s monster crushing you into a fine dust. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the only way to play the game. Suddenly, storming the castle feels like a much faster paced and more empowering experience. The monotony of the “start level, kill stuff, get loot, fight boss” formula and the brutality of the baddies somehow magically becomes a bearable and, believe it or not, fun experience. Suddenly the metaphoric candy gets a bit sweeter. That being said, Castlevania: HD is a game that is inherently better with friends. And what is your reward at the top? A delicious looking candy that tastes worse and worse the more you eat it. It’s like an uphill trek to the peak of molasses mountain. When going it alone, the experience is too unforgiving and has a tendency to feel slow and laborious. This causes the already ticking (and totally unnecessary) clock to lose five minutes per death! That’s just a type of unnecessary cruelty that I can’t get down with. At that point, your comrades can either revive you with one of the few rejuvenation potions that are found on the map, or you can be slaughtered again and again in your skeletal form. For example, when you or one of your teammates kicks the proverbial bucket, you’ll be turned into a skeleton whose only offense is throwing a bone to cause minimal damage. It’s that breed of difficult that Castlevania games have always had, but with some extra hindrances. While you get a knack for your preferred character, you’ll also be faced with another challenge the game throws at you: the brutal difficulty. So, as you use one of the five available whippersnappers (get it?) to try your luck at besting Dracula and his macabre crew, you will just have to figure them out as you go. How do you do this? By pressing the “up” button on the directional pad, of course! And you can most certainly do this in Castlevania: HD, but here is the catch: Konami kind of assumes that you should just know what you’re doing and makes no mention of how it works in Castlevania: HD. She can then use these glyphs to imitate said enemies’ abilities. For example, in the Nintendo DS game Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, you assume the role of Shanoa, a sexy vampire slayer with the ability to absorb magical glyphs from enemies. Now, unless you have played the Castlevania games that each character stems from, chances are you will have no idea what abilities are unique to them. The whole experience can just be one big unintuitive mess. Considering the entire game is based on progression via loot instead of traditional RPG leveling, it’s maddening that you can’t tweak your characters on the fly. Then, once you’ve finally made your way into one of the paltry six levels of the game (which, for some unknown reason, are timed to not exceed thirty minutes of gameplay), you will find that you cannot equip any gained weapons, armor, or items unless at the designated areas. Even after playing the game for hours and hours, you may still find yourself fumbling around trying to get to the menu you wanted. A convoluted mess of submenus buried in menus. Navigation of the UI, from equipping your character to the matchmaking, is downright nasty. One of the biggest flaws that plagues Castlevania: HD is almost everything that has to do with menus. However, the latest “Metroidvania” entry in the vampire slaying series has some serious issues land it somewhere between a dream and a nightmare. For me, Castlevania: Harmony of Despair should have been one of those games. Chock full of favorite characters, awesome music, and fantastic level design. It would be a game full of self-tailored fan service. In a perfect world, each and every gamer would be able to create their own “dream game”. But is this the cooperative whiplashing action you’ve been waiting for? Castlevania: Harmony of Despair is the third release in the Xbox Live Summer of Arcade 2010 series and it brings franchise favorite characters together in a multiplayer romp against the infamous Dracula.
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