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It’s simply staggering to think that the game’s designers would think anybody would want to explore city streets or factories compared to the jaw-dropping environments of the first game – we’ve got Call of Battlefield and four hundred other modern combat games that do these types of concrete areas infinitely better, thank you very much.
CASTLEVANIA LORDS OF SHADOW 2 SERIES
The other environment – yes, there are only two environment types, compared to the original’s several dozen – is a series of monotone urban streets and factories. So you end up trudging directly from A to B despite the many paths around you. There’s one slight hitch though – the player can’t actually explore any of these new directions until they unlock the requisite ability to do so. Instead of dozens of linear levels set in exciting new environs, half of the playing environment in LOS2 is Dracula’s sprawling castle, littered with branching hubs leading off to different areas. Apparently he wasn’t happy being compared favourably to one of the most successful Playstation franchises of all time, and thus decided to make the sequel more like Darksiders. Many fans of the original compared it to the immensely popular God of War series, but the sequel’s Producer recently said that this, “…really pissed us off”. I think I know where it all went so wrong. And let’s face it, who doesn’t enjoy ripping history’s most infamous monsters into tiny chunks of bleeding meat? It turned out to be one of my favourite third person action of the last generation, so I’m finding it hard to fathom how Mercury Storm managed to screw up the sequel quite so badly. While each level might involved the player traversing straight from A to B, the massive variety in their environments made each tunnel more exciting than the last. Yet these issues were easy to ignore in the face of the explosive, satisfying combat system, which slowly revealed new flesh-shredding treats just as you’d mastered the last. Even I can admit that there was a lot that was rubbish about the game – a camera that controlled worse than a wonky shopping trolley, level design as open as Sydney’s cross-city tunnel, and a storyline with all the gravitas of the Transformers’ series. I’d set Steam to invisible mode while playing it, so my pals couldn’t see I was spending so much time with a game that was critically panned. The original Castlevania: Lords of Shadow was a bit like Downton Abbey for me – a guilty pleasure.