CHAIRQASITION: Castlevania: Lords of Shadow

Your intrepid heroes enjoy a Proton powered romp through Castlevania: Lords of Shadow – Ultimate Edition.

CHAIRQUISITION:

– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies

Game: Castlevania: Lords of Shadow – Ultimate Edition
Webzone: https://store.steampowered.com/app/234080/Castlevania_Lords_of_Shadow__Ultimate_Edition/
Devel: MercurySteam – Climax Studios
Engine: Custom
Price: 24.99 USD/32.99 CAD

Wazzat: Castlevania: Lords of Shadow – Ultimate Edition is the complete edition of Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, a dark and vivid new re-imagining of the Castlevania mythology. It is the end of days and ungodly powers isolate the Earth.

Venn:

Does It Launch

Everything works OOTB and I mean everything.
Changing resolutions, switching from windowed to fullscreen etc.

Performance @ 1080

120 / 140 @ 1080p with everything on YOLO.
45’ish @ UHD.

Graphics

No noticeable glitches but this is a DX9 title so that’s to be expected.

Control

This is a perfect title for the Steam controller since camera movement is not an issue.
Sorry Valve, no amount of futzing with settings make the right areola an analog stick.
Well, it’s is an issue, just not in the way you might think.
Also works with the XClone.

Jordan:

Does It Launch

Performance @ 1080

Averaging 160fps @1080

Graphics

They’re OK. Xbox 360 standard
Remember when castlevania had good music?
I had to dig up the rondo of blood soundtrack and it made playing this game so much better
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GXNDugXvqE&t=163s

Control

Everything works
Xbox prompts though. RIP Dualshock users
FUCK THE CAMERA

Strider:

Does It Launch

Nothing to complain about, just launches the way you’d expect it too
Wanted to test on openSUSE but couldn’t get the HDMI sound to work so I only tested on Ubuntu 18.10 (Intel and AMD)

Performance @ 1080

Ran perfectly smooth at 1440p on the GTX970 and at 1080p on the RX580, but it is a 5 year old port of an 8 year old game so you’d expect that.
Not going to bother with framerates for this reason, makes no sense to benchmark a game that old on the hardware I have. It’s smooth, that’s all you need to know.

Graphics / Music / SFX

For it’s age the graphics look really good (if you don’t look to close at some textures), there are some beautiful environment, it’s really tastefully made.
In term of visual richness, I’d put it between a Darksiders and a Devil May Cry
The voice actor cast is seriously good, we have Robert Carlyle (Trainspotting, The Full Monty), Natascha McElhone (The Truman Show, Californication) and of course Sir Patrick Stewart who narrates the whole game.
That’s one way of making me pay attention to your loading screens!
The music is OK but it’s a pretty generic heroic fantasy, LOTR style score. I keep progressing through the game and expecting to be rewarded with a remastered version of Vampire Killer or Bloody Tears.

Control

You sure would like to rotate that camera, uh?
Let me remind you for a second what game you’re playing: it’s Castlevania
Whether in 2D or in 3D, Castlevania is a game that doesn’t show everything to the player
Notice how the early games didn’t always scroll, you switched from screen to screen, and sometimes you have a bad surprise waiting for you
Think of it more like a 2.5 action adventure game.
You want bad camera controls? Play Curse of Darkness on PS2.
Since there are no camera controls, this is perfectly suited for the Steam controller

QA Score:

Fedora:
Ubuntu:
Ubuntu:

Fun section:

Fun?:

Venn:
- Oh hi Patrick Stewart.
- Dicks, the things QTE can eat.
- I mean, the QTE have QTE and that’s not even an a exaggeration.
- Camera control? What camera control!
- You know what they added in Lords of shadow 2?
- Camera control.
- I’ve noticed the lack camera control severely limits my willingness to explore.
- Fairy titties, Snake titties, Golem titties… decided lack of penis titties.
- Normal difficulty is Darks Souls hard.
- I should say Dark Souls III hard since it’s the only one I have played.
- BTW, Dark Souls isn’t hard, nay, it’s meerley done a masterful job exploiting gamers lack of impulse control.
Jordan
- It’s not really dark souls hard. Dark souls hard is the first enemy in the starting area bodying you
- This is God of War hard. And this game does a very good job of converting castlevania into god of war
- Oh there be quicktime events. Every bossfight is a series of them, just like god of war
- And that almost ruined this game for me. I hate QTEs. They’re not hard, I just overthink them
- The rest of the game, running around, killing giant spiders, regular 3d castlevania stuff is actually pretty fun. The platforming/exploration is a little dumb though
- The combat is fluid and they have a little RPG mechanic in there to unlock different combos and magic powers
- The combo meter/magic health regen thing is pretty neat. It’s different than the health orbs that GoW used
- I spent about 30 minutes trying to remember the name of the main character’s voice actor. He was the fucker from SGU and the Full Monty
Strider:
- 3rd person action adventure games happen to be my favorite style of game (or just action / adventure, doesn’t have to be 3D)
- Doesn’t mean I’m really good at them
- Remember that hard game we had before we started comparing every single hard game in existence to Dark Souls? What was it called? Oh, yeah, Castlevania.
- You just need to practise and you’ll finally beat that boss.
- The jump to 3D is very nicely done as it doesn’t go full 3D and preserves some aspects of the 2D platformers
- Like DOOM and Tomb Raider, this is a pretty solid reboot