Wolfox

score: 4/5

The game is first of all what it's supposed to be, fun. While far from the origins of Castlevania, you can still feel the difficulty of older games (or at least the ones I played ) in this game. A change from the Metroidvania norm of focusing mostly on exploring is that this game focusses more so in Combat. and at that, the combat is Combo Based. That may or may not take some getting used to depending on the player, but it does allow for more action-packed boss fights (coming back to that later). The story, mostly displayed by cutscenes, is decent. While not being something extreme it does at least show us a little about the Belmont Family. The cutscenes are, sadly, unskippable. This can make playing the game a second or third time a bit annoying when they show up.

The game has 3 chapters and a short tutorial. each chapter focusing on another character:

The Tutorial shows us Gabriel Belmont, the first chapter Simon Belmont, the second chapter Alucard and the final chapter gives us Trevor Belmont. This can make some area's of the map seem to be copy and pasted, but it at least makes sense that they are (You're in the same castle, wo why would the same area be completely redesigned for each chapter?). For each character, the basic gameplay stays the same. combos and everything. each character does, however, get their own special set of projectiles and such.

And now for the boss fights. Not easy and fun to do. there is, sadly, a pretty glaring weakness this game has: quick time events. to really finish off a boss you gotta succeed in a QuickTime event. Another thing that I would say is a bit much is the Checkpoints in the boss fights. once you reach a certain point in the battle you will return from there when you die during the rest of the boss battle, this is usually around halfway through the battle. And while I completely understand why they did this, it takes a little bit of the challenge off for me.

And now I will give a little shout-out to something that the game did amazingly: the Eshop demo. Instead of creating something new and limiting you to that, the demo takes place during a part of the game (an early part of a certain chapter. no spoilers from me here). Is this lazy? Maybe. but it does allow you to feel the game well from just the demo.