(Played via Castlevania Anniversary Collection on Nintendo Switch)

Castlevania is an absolutely classic game that I am fairly split on, largely because every fun moment feels like it is equalized by a frustrating one. Simon's Castlevania jump physics are wonky, sure, but you can adjust to them pretty fast. By the end of the first group of stages I had little trouble making jumps on platforms, for example. Far more trouble comes in the active game and level design which frequently does NOT feel designed with the slow mechanics in mind, most obvious with any number of small jumping or floating enemies that become infuriating to hit in a multitiude of positions. When the game begins to absolutely spam these, such as on Stage 17, the fun factor tanks and the frustration factor sets in.

This is unfortunate because when the game is more about slow and deliberate platforming with more "fair" enemies it is pretty fun! Or even ones where you can kind of out think them, such as Holy Water on the bats in Stage 16 (although boy that stage would SUCK without power-ups), or a fair amount of the earlier levels really. It feels like the game would do better to lean into this style more given the controls, rather than the more SMB1-ish platforming you'll see in stuff like the aforementioned Stage 17. The sub weapon balance is also all over the place to the point that avoiding accidentally picking up the many more useless weapons is an important part of playstyle. Garlic is very powerful, Holy Water is busted and the cross is good, avoid stuff like the dagger.

Difficulty in general is all over the place, leading to cases of "will it be incredibly tough or will you cheese it". Death without Holy Water is ridiculously challenging, Death with Holy Water just asks you to properly time jumping and attacking to stunlock him forever. Even the final boss' second form can be cheesed this way if you have at least one projectile upgrade, making 2/3rds of the final bosses able to be turned into total jokes, although I wasn't able to do that which led to a lot more pure tough attempts. Most of the other bosses are very easy, but the Level 4 boss gave me some real fits until I won almost effortlessly for reasons I don't understand, sometimes it feels like pure luck. It takes away that sweet difficulty game "YEAH, I BEAT THAT!" high at times.

As an extremely early NES platformer it doesn't exactly have a ton of story, but for what it does do it does well. Old NES games are often about working around the limitations of the hardware to allow the player's imagination to fill the gaps, which makes setpieces and the like more important. This is something Castlevania's an expert at! The stairway climb to Dracula is iconic to the point that soooo many Castlevania games use it and is well-done here, but there's also stuff like the intro with Simon arriving at Dracula's gates, the long vertical drop into the dungeons / catacombs, having a platform section start with just the night sky to the left and a little ledge you can walk to as if to gaze out at it, and my personal favorite: Simon's chugging walk every time you complete a section of stages, while Dracula's bat form flees.

This goes hand in hand with how well done this game's graphics and sound are for the NES. This game positively oozes aesthetic for a 1986 NES game with great spritework for the time, for example the crescent moon in the walk up to Dracula is a great look, and the entire game has a somewhat dark, gritty, gothic feel to it that makes you feel like you're playing out an old school vampire novel. The songs slap for the era with particular highlights of Vampire Killer (DOOT-DOOT-DO-DO-DO-DO), Poison Mind, Nothing to Lose and Black Knight. This game is up there with Kirby's Adventure and Super Mario Bros. 3 when it comes to graphics (though I'd definitely give it to SMB3 by a large margin) for NES graphics.

All in all, Castlevania is a game too flawed for me to feel comfortable calling good, yet with too many elements I enjoyed to call it back, giving it that coveted 5/10 "average" score. Masocore gamers will absolutely enjoy this more than most and it is a classic for anyone who enjoys that tough difficulty, people interested in Castlevania's roots or just plain good looking NES games will also enjoy checking it out if they can handle the uneven and frustrating difficulty. I'd say it's worth giving a look once, but I wouldn't exactly be jumping to come back to it.

For me, I think what kills the roguelike, or at least its modern incarnation, is that it hardly ever feels like what you're actually doing is all that interesting. The prominent entries of the genre are mostly barebones twin-stick shooters and top-down hacks-and-slash where the only skill that you end up learning is the ability to remember what hundreds of different enemies and upgrades do, a feat better accomplished by crawling the wiki than the dungeon. The assertion that roguelikes are the successors to arcade gaming has always been lost on me, because, in my eyes, they're really polar opposites. The best arcade games tend to have complex (but often deceptively simple) movesets and extremely basic, easily-digestible enemy types, a legacy that Cadence fulfills better than any of her peers. By default, all it takes to play Necrodancer is the four arrow keys, and yet it's able to create a sickeningly high skill ceiling, in no small part due to the crypt's inhabitants, or, more accurately, their simplicity. Enemies in this game are so absurdly basic that their AI can usually be described in less than a single sentence, meaning they don't pose any semblance of a threat by themselves. Instead, the challenge comes from clearing out a room full of them, using a set of mechanics that's, in essence, a tactical RPG where you should always be able to know what each of your opponents are going to do on their next turn. But therein lies the rub, and the justification for the light rhythm elements, because you're only given a fraction of a second to analyze each situation. The end result is an inherently fair experience- if you die, it's because your processing power isn't fast enough, not because you're unfamiliar with any of the rules. Upgrades uphold this by entirely being simple +1s to your attack, range, defense, health, or some other self-explanatory factor, but their lack of complexity doesn't stifle how much minute creativity is involved. Cleverly carving out more room for yourself, getting a dragon to take out enemies for you, or breaking a barrel with a trap to save your only bomb. All part of a language that you can feel yourself learning every time you game over, but also one that, admittedly, takes a lot of time to even start babbling in. It shouldn't be surprising that a game with this high of a skill ceiling (after forty hours I'm nowhere near good enough to beat all zones with Aria, and she's far from the hardest character) has such a steep learning curve, though I wish it was managed better, considering almost everyone I've recommended it to was able to breeze through zone 1 and then gave up on zone 2. But heed my advice, keep digging, and you'll find a challenge that genuinely rewards the work you put in.

Oh, and it should go without saying, but one of the most heart-pounding soundtracks out there. REANIMATE!

⌚ Time to finish - 10 hours 30 minutes
🤬Difficulty - easy

🔊 Soundtrack - Great sound track and fitting. Nothing that stood out especially.
🌄Graphics – Remastered was great but not really much to gawk at in a post apocalyptical world. Nothing really creative here. Just what you would expect, broken buildings, destroyed cars.
🌦 Atmosphere – Excellent atmosphere. Tense at times. I really felt part of the world.
📚 Main Story / Characters – Story telling, narration, and the cast of characters is the strength. The story itself is not that creative and predictable. If it weren't for the characters and how the story is told this game would have been a major flop.
🤺 Combat – Fair. Combat is not the strength of this game. Combat seems pretty half baked but gets better as the game goes on. Fights vs humans is just stealth and choke. Fights vs infected gets interesting but still easy. However it wasn't boring. Because bullets are scarce you don't really use any weapons you get. I think 90% of my kills were stealth.
🤖 AI: AI is pretty dumb. Sometimes they don't even see you crouched next to you. Clear their focus was story and not combat.
🧭 Side Activities / Exploration – None apart from collectibles etc. Did I even find any?
🚗 Movement/Physics – fine. Some parts of traversing the game like finding ladders and moving them, floaty devices, opening gates, was slow and completely unnecessary.
📣 Voice acting – Excellent.

📝 Review:

Definitely coming to it later than everyone. I came into it very hyped as one of the greatest games ever made. For such title I expect everything to be perfect and have depth. I felt the story telling was great, touching, on par with Drake 2 and some of the best in any game. But pretty much every other aspect was mediocre. Combat with humans was simple stealth take downs, tension was created fighting infected clickers but once you know how to use Molotov bottles they aren’t hard.

The crafting system was bleh. Story itself was standard though the characters and how the story was told was great . I certainly enjoyed the game , atmosphere , emotional connection and will play LOU 2. But certainly not one of the best games ever made.

Certain aspects of the game are a chore. Gate openings finding ladders and moving them. Looking for floaty stuff since Elle can’t swim. Really unnecessary and pointless. I think it added 30 minutes to game without any real value.

Because of how powerful stealth is and how overwhelmed you get if you make noise… most of the time I never used any guns expect when it was like 1 or 2 left and I wanted to use guns I been collecting lol so they don’t get wasted.

💡Final Thoughts:

Definitely play it but don't go in expecting best game ever. Expect one of the best examples of story telling and know there are some mundane things thrown in between. Just get past it. The characters grow, you get attached to them, and you also see the connection between them all. Definitely an emotional tale, which is what kept me going past all the ladder sequences :)

Finally got around to playing through this in full. It's a really weird game to even exist, there were a lot of basic ports of Doom to various consoles, but it's pretty wild how fully new this is. Despite using a lot of the same weapons and enemies, they're all remade from scratch and feel a bit different, alongside an updated engine and a completely new set of levels, this feels more like an alternate reality's version of Doom. I think the feel of the movement and weapons isn't quite as good as the original, but it's certainly not bad (at least playing on pc, can't imagine it's great on an N64 controller). The level design is mostly pretty good, there's a couple I disliked but overall I'd probably put it over Doom 2's levels but below 1's. The updated lighting and different enemies definitely gives it its own style, which I don't think I'd say I like more but it's a nice change of pace. Doesn't really hold a candle to modern WADs but it would definitely be unfair to expect it to, and it's definitely worth playing overall if you're a fan of the series.

I was just smiling ear to ear the whole time playing this. I'm so bad at Pac-Man and here comes a game that's taking great influence from pac-man to make a much easier to get into (thanks to the score-life system) and different beast that is much more tangible but just as interesting as the good ol' Namco game! Props to the creator still having that great different enemy behavior and especially with levels that provide different quick-thinking routing with their own mechanics without ever getting stale. Absolutely in love with the game's simple charm too, just so refreshing to see. Please do pick this up and give it some love it has all the heart in the world and such wonderful sensibilities to the genre ^w^

What’s killing Pacific Drive for me is that I find the loop pretty dull. There’s not much to driving, the procedural loot map stuff is really mind numbing. A lot of the difficulty from the later areas comes from the hazard modifiers, which are mostly turning the knobs up on radiation, damage taken etc. A well-kitted car doesn’t feel all that different to travel in, you’re just turning the knobs up on your car’s attributes to keep up. 10 hours in, I get in a big ol’ crash — this part of the game’s good, just reacting to hazards, messing up and paying for it — but as I think of the loop I’m gonna have to participate in to make up for it, how little it differs from the usual routine, how much I’ve already been avoiding the loot cycle, I think I’m good! There’s just nothing to break it up. The narrative’s pretty slow, propped up exclusively by one-sided conversations with performances that’d be more enjoyably hammy if they weren’t the only thing driving the story, which consequentially feels pretty thin — not that I needed more than “haunted wagon, haunted Washington” to check it out anyway. Killer mood, mood killer to play.

You need to set your expectations right with this one to appreciate it. Pacific Drive is much more of a chill and occasionally spooky atmospheric looting/scrapping/crafting game with a focus on vehicle customization than it is a stalker-like or death stranding-like where death and danger are constant concerns. Initially I was disappointed by how loot-oriented it is, stopping your drive every 30 seconds to sift through a copy-paste interior with generic crafting mats is repetitive and not very interesting, but I eventually got into the flow of it. Moreso I feel the true letdown here is the anomalies: I think it would be gauche to want actual “monsters” - it’s not that sort of game, but the array of benign atmospheric hazards that comprise the bestiary here don’t really instill much tension in the gameplay; even in the final and supposedly most dangerous zone, there’s not much here that can’t be circumvented by just driving a little bit around it, and anomalies like “corrosive mist”, “shock mist” and “irradiated ground” just feel very uncreative considering they take up the same slots as tourists and wriggling wrecks that feel like genuine anomalies. The first time I got to the “Eerie Darkness” zone I was shitting myself at every random atmospheric noise, but once you come to the realisation that nothing is really out there and nothing will ever be there, the game kinda loses a lot of its mystique. Even from the perspective of the survival mechanics, the game is very easy - once you load your car up with reserve tanks and batteries, you’ll basically never run out of fuel or charge, and the result is that you can just gun it wherever without much regard for resource management in the lategame. In this sense I think it was a bad idea to make the game revolve around returning to a home base over and over - a continuous journey without free recharge/refuels could have introduced more long-term ramifications for bad decision-making, and it would have made me think about using all those oil barrels lying around that I never needed to touch or battery jumpers sitting in my trunk all game, and more linearity could have allowed some actual level design to be introduced into the game instead of endless proc-gen (it’s telling that the story missions that use preset layouts feel much more interesting than the proc-gen stuff).

Still, the atmosphere is so good in this game that I enjoyed it quite a bit, the driving mechanics are very well executed, and the quirk mechanic in particular is pretty genius; letting your car develop unique traits that further endear you to it, which is weaved in with the overarching narrative themes about obsession and letting go. I feel the whole narrative package would be a lot better if the ending was better though. [spoilers incoming!] I really thought the game was building up to a moment where you would have to sacrifice your own car, and I thought this would be really powerful. Every character in this game is wrestling with some sort of obsession that’s keeping them tied to the zone, and the game ends with Oppy overcoming hers and finally letting go of Allen’s death, and a very good parallel moment with the Driver needing to let go of their own car, which they’ve forged a connection with throughout the game, seemed like an obvious choice, but the game instead goes for a very video-gamey “you just unlocked Free Play mode!” ending where nothing really happens, which feels like it misses The Point in a narrative where letting go is the main theme.

Pretty cool game overall if you can take it for what it is, but I do think the same concept could be executed better, which I would like to see because the concept of this game is so good. In general I really like the “long haul through a hostile environment with gameplay revolving around logistics instead of combat” archetype and would love more games like it. Maybe I’m just looking forward to Death Stranding 2…

game that i imagine gets really fun once you know where every enemy and stage hazard is. sadly, this means that playing it for the first time sucks!! there are just so many cases of an enemy hidden behind a waterfall, or random spikes on the ground. this is a game that wants you to go as fast as you can, and i spent the entire time at a crawl

i still want to give other sonic games a chance. i know people absolutely love these games. i just sadly found the hour i spent playing this one to be so incredibly frustrating :(