Definitely one of the better platformers out there, and miles better than all of the Mario Bros. games for sure. The only two criticisms I have for this game are that releasing and gaining momentum is very weird and inconsistent (especially for landing and swimming), and the fact that the game irregularly switches between quick pace and slow pace in a matter of seconds, testing your patience to the limit. Other than that, I think this game builds up difficulty very well throughout the 7 different islands (except island 4, that one is awful), has amazing visuals, great music and overall a fun personality. The unlockables you get through finding puzzle pieces are also very interesting, as you get to see some development art. Recommend it to anyone!

Great concept, a roguelike with poker elements! Very satisfying when you get combo's, and the characters all play in their own unique way. It would be even better if there were more main-line stories, instead of just the one that gets repeatedly harder. It's very fun to speedrun this, especially when you have your characters on either rebirth 1 or rebirth 2 (like a prestige mode in which you get to use all your abilities). Visually, the game needs a lot of improvement, because it gets laggy on higher settings, even if you have a good PC. Must say, after completing it fully, I am never touching it again, though...it satisfied me for the time being but it has no interesting bits for me to want to get back into it. The price at launch was about 15 euro's, so in that sense I enjoyed it enough!

The game started solid and I was actually enjoying myself, but the further I got the more shitty it became.

My thoughts:
(+ = (mostly) positive; - = (mostly) negative)
+- Gameplay;
The gameplay really is a mix of good and bad. I liked how the game felt. The controls were nice, whip attacks felt good and there was a nice amount of different spell moves.
The map itself tho was horrible. Why are there 2 copies of the same map. I didn't like how they connected, because I felt like they didn't connect at all. I get it's supposed to be a maze, but some parts were close to impossible to solve, other than just backtracking for minutes/hours. For me that's just a lame excuse to add gametime, I'd rather have a thought at maze which actually gives clever hints on where to go to next (looking at super metroid and such).
If the map wasn't so shit, the game would have been pretty good.

- Music;
Gameboy music on a GBA game. It wasn't really bad but music I got bored with rather quickly.

+ Graphics;
Visuals are pretty neat. The area's are all unique enough and the enemy designs look pretty cool.

- Story/Characters;
Couldn't really care about it cause it was nothing memorable.

Recommend?
No, I'm sure there are plenty of other castlevania games that are better. I only played this one because I know the next games will/should be better.

Man I never expected the first of the series to be this good! Story is great, and honestly pretty funny (which is something of a rarity for me when it comes to games). Music (apart from Joke's End) is very good too. The Bros Moves are AMAZING in this game. They kind of let you try stuff out on your own by increasing the difficulty of the moves instantly if you want to, and figuring out how to use them is so satisfying. The advancements in the moves is such a great idea and I am honestly a little disappointed they removed this in later instances.
You know, this game definitely had more soul than Dream Team and Paper Jam, that's for sure. The first three games will always hold a special place in my heart. And now I can say that I played all of them :)