Останні рецензії користувача Kougeru

Short review. It's the DS trilogy, as advertised. They made simple by great changes to make it work on PC. Keyboard/Mouse controls are kinda bad but XBOX and Dualsense controllers work great. The FPS seems to be locked to around 60 (Usually 63 for some reason) but there's technical reasons for that so it's a non-issue and very understandable given the era these games came from. I rarely had any fps drops and resource usage is almost non-existent on my 3080+5700x system. Literally sits at like 5-10% CPU usage while streaming and GPU usage around 10-20% with other things open.

I don't think anything in the actual games have been changed. Nothing removed or added, just adapted to work better with controllers due to lack of stylus/dual screen. They even added multiple options for viewing the dual screens - and even 3 screens at the same time. Having the map always visible is fantastic, though I wish I could zoom in on it.

Overall, if you like 2D Castlevania games, there's nothing to complain about here. They're all amazing and fun games that are finally freed from "DS Jail". I think for the launch price of $24.99 you get a great deal. Each game should take the average gamer around 10 hours to clear, more if you spend time grinding and/or looking for secrets. That's minimum 30 hours of Castlevania goodness for $25. I definitely recommend this game to anyone who loves the genre and especially old school Castlevania fans.

Edit: I forgot to mention there is Save States, but I assume most people buying this already knew that since previously collections have had those. There's also Haunted Castle which adds yet another hour or two of gameplay.

Great performance, good gameplay and balance. Just need to learn and perservere. I'm clearing fine with 40 vigor just by...not getting hit after learning the fights.

May 5, 2024 edit: Sony just announced they no longer plan to force PSN so I've reversed my recommendations back to positive


May 3, 2024: Decent game with a good idea. But the developers seem to balance based off usage % which leads to nerf after nerf, making things less and less fun to use every update. Then they bait & switch and suddenly decide PSN account will be required. A lot of my friends won't be able to play because PSN doesn't exist in their countries. This is awful. Furthermore, when I bought the game it NEVER asked for a PlayStation account. I was gifted the game so I never saw the steam store page but that text requires too much scrolling to be legally valid anyway. Make it a pop-up that requires clicking a checkbox to acknowledge or something. As it stands now, there was zero indication that PSN accounts would be needed eventually. So many people won't be able to play at all. I don't even want cross-play.

Inferior to the original in every way. The story/lore felt really forced. They were obviously just trying to capture what made the first game unique but tried way too hard. The fight design seems to have suffered from the game having 3 weapons this time. They obviously needed to balance the fights to ensure every weapon was viable. This resulted in most fight being extremely easy with the exception of Eviterno which went the entire opposite direction and is the worst designed fight I've seen in the genre. The sudden difficulty spike with that fight is part of the problem but phase 2 overall is just horribly designed. Metroidvania fights are supposed to be clearable with just reaction and observation. Eviterno is contradictory to that entire concept. Eviterno forces you to memorize the 2nd phase. The fact that you can't skip cutscenes in a 2023 game is also extremely bizarre and just feels like lazy programming. The fact that the inability to skip cutscenes hasn't been patched in the 7+ months since launch says a lot as well.

The first game was fantastic except for the convoluted ending unlocks. This game is just worst in every way. It even still has a convoluted ending unlock even though literally no one enjoys that.

I was very worried this game would be a lot less than it is. The years of delays, studio change, ect ect made me worried. But it lived up to my expectations and more. Absolutely fantastic game with dozens of hours of entertainment. Beautiful anime-style graphics with stunning animations while still running at a buttery 120 fps. Cagliostro is the only thing that matters but all the characters play fairly uniquely and are interesting enough that I'll probably grind everyone's Terminus weapon in the end. I just hope to see this game grow more over time.

Mixed feelings about this. On the surface it seems pretty solid but I'm not sure if it will actually make anyone better at aiming. But more than that, most of the features are locked behind paywalls. Calling this "Free to play" is very misleading. It's "Free to start" but if you want the real useful stuff you gotta pay quite a bit.

10/10 cuteness

June 26, 2024 update:
500 hours of gameplay later and 10 months in the real world, we've only had 1 real update and it's a minor update that added a small map. Last year we were promised a ton of massive changes by the end of 2023 and got only one set of those. They're still no where in sight and we're missing vital QoL changes such as removing/upgrading the photo system. Overall, I've lost faith in the development team when it takes them nearly a year to barely add anything. Maybe they're putting too many resources into the console version rather than making the game worthy of leaving early access. 4 years for the game we have is very disappointing. It had a lot of promise in 2020 and very little has been met. Despite having over 1200 hours, I can't really recommend people spending money on this when it seems like the developers are barely working on it anymore.

August 19, 2023 review:

Preface: I love this game. I have almost 800 hours in it and was over level 4000 before today. I played the new update 8 hours today. Even ignoring the bugs, this update has been very disappointing and a lot feels both meaningless but also like it will push away more casual players.

1. Level "Reset". Why was this needed? It shows up on the badge. The fact that this was even recorded means the reset didn't need to happen. They could've given our levels back into the new system. Just meaningless.

2. 3 tiers of equipment. Tier 1 just makes the game harder, especially for new players. I think this is a bad idea since most people couldn't even clear professional regularly before. Tier 2 is the old equipment. At worst it would take decent players a dozen hours or so to unlock it all. So after a few hours tier 1 equipment becomes completely pointless outside of "challenge" mode. For causal players who can't win often, the awful tier 1 items (such as Spirit box that detects but doesn't respond until the 24th try) will deter people from playing. Tier 1 is far less fun than the old (now tier 2) equipment. They make the early level games pointlessly more grindy largely just by having lower interaction rates and such.

3. Money wipe. Also meaningless. The higher payouts are nice but negated the money wipe since the only people who had money were people able to win at a decent rate. Those same people are making bank now. Why even bother wiping the money when we can still afford everything easily? I honestly like that we have to rebuy things that get used up - it makes sense. But the money wipe itself just feels pointless when we can make over $1000 in 5 minutes on professional.

Overall the game is still fun, but for the first major patch in a year, I'm disappointed. Again, I'm a huge fan of the game and want it to grow and be better. But this update we waited a year for.... It's weird how most of it feels pointless. The tier 1 equipment feels like a step back completely. I love the designs though.

I also like all the ghost changes/fixes, those and tier 3 items are the only things that don't feel pointless in this update.

IMO, the best course of action would be to simply remove the Tier 1 items ,start at Tier 2 and have all of Tier 3 items unlocked by Level 50. Good players will be rewarded after a dozen or 2 dozen hours of professional, new players will still have a long grind but the "old" items aren't completely painful like the new Tier 1 items are. Tier 1 items are just completely unfun and uninspired. This patch taking a full year is so bizarre when there's no new map, ghost, or any real new content...just slight upgrades to older ones. It makes me worried about the future of the game when it takes a year to get so little.

This game is very linear and predictable but still interesting enough for the price. Because it's linear, all the scares are just jump scares.Not really scary but still enjoyable.

Only major issues I've found is that it's very badly optimized. I have an RTX 3080 and GPU usage is never above 30%. 1440p with all settings maxed out I'm only getting about 60 FPS - a game like this should easily hit 144 fps with my specs.

No where near as good as everyone made it sound like it would be.

To make it simple, it's really just unfair a lot of the time. Especially single-player. Your mobility is very limited while the enemy vastly outnumber you most of the time. And to make matters worse, as many other reviews have stated, a lot of enemies simply have super armor so that you can't skillfully combo things to death like in older games. A lot of aspects around the controls also just feel very dated - as if almost no effort was made to modernize. I Assume they wanted to please all the old fans but there are ways to do taht while also improving. Adding more mobility options would've been one way.

Super armor is the dumbest thing to happen to this genre