An overall excellent Castlevania-style metroidvania. If you like Symphony of the Night, you'll like this game.

Movement is tight and feels good. An absolutely massive variety of weapons, spells and abilities lets you really customize how you want to play and keeps things fresh. The exploration, map design and basic progression of the game is simple but fairly well executed. There's also tons of stuff to find and collect for completionists, New Game+, extra difficulty levels, 2 additional playable characters, a ton of extra bonus modes, plus QoL features that you wish the old Castlevania games had. In short, this game owns.

The game's biggest weakness is its presentation. It lacks the detail and quality lighting to really sell the atmosphere. The story is kind of whatever, the voice acting and dialogue is mid-tier and the story isn't really interesting, mostly just an excuse to have the game. The music is pretty good but there's nothing outstanding.

There's a few other minor things I don't like. Touch damage from enemies can be frustrating, for some reason it just feels wrong in this game. The food crafting system and sidequests are tedious and don't really add anything to the game except more stuff to keep completionists busy. The spells are poorly balanced, there's a few which kind of trivialize most of the game (but I think the fun of the game is mostly about becoming overpowered anyway). I don't like that you have to beat the game to unlock the higher difficulties.

But none of that really damages the core fun of the game, it's still a great time.

An overall excellent Castlevania-style metroidvania. If you like Symphony of the Night, you'll like this game. Movement is tight and feels good. An absolutely massive variety of weapons, spells and abilities lets you really customize how you want to play and keeps things fresh. The exploration, map design and basic progression of the game is simple but fairly well executed. There's also tons of stuff to find and collect for completionists, New Game+, extra difficulty levels, 2 additional playable characters, a ton of extra bonus modes, plus QoL features that you wish the old Castlevania games had. In short, this game owns. The game's biggest weakness is its presentation. It lacks the detail and quality lighting to really sell the atmosphere. The story is kind of whatever, the voice acting and dialogue is mid-tier and the story isn't really interesting, mostly just an excuse to have the game. The music is pretty good but there's nothing outstanding. There's a few other minor things I don't like. Touch damage from enemies can be frustrating, for some reason it just feels wrong in this game. The food crafting system and sidequests are tedious and don't really add anything to the game except more stuff to keep completionists busy. The spells are poorly balanced, there's a few which kind of trivialize most of the game (but I think the fun of the game is mostly about becoming overpowered anyway). I don't like that you have to beat the game to unlock the higher difficulties. But none of that really damages the core fun of the game, it's still a great time.