I’m probably way too charitable when it comes to Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2. It’s a disappointment not because it isn’t engaging but because it so often is, right up until it suddenly falters.
Konami and Mercury Storm’s latest collaboration has met with…mixed reviews. It currently holds a critical metascore of 63 on Metacritic, with some particularly savage scores in the 50s and 40s. Common complaints include the game’s uneven pacing, its baffling mandatory-stealth sections, and its sizable borrowed arsenal of copycat mechanics.
Despite all that, I enjoyed my time with LoS2. Maybe it’s the game’s unabashedly bombastic tone; ham-handed melodrama goes down easy when mated to baroque aesthetics and a basically competent combat system. Maybe it’s lingering fondness for Mercury Storm’s previous entry, a stash of goodwill regularly renewed by the occasional clever callback or stirring moment. Maybe it’s the game’s expansive sense of scope; not that much actually happens in LoS2, but it’s a lot of very dramatic nothing.
Or maybe it’s just gratitude for another (relatively) big-budget action-adventure title on the console market that doesn’t star the Batman. I had begun to fear they were going extinct.
Reviewers’ criticisms have generally been valid, because there’s a lot to criticize here. Lords of Shadow 2’s plot is uneven, jolting from moment to moment and scene to scene; it can’t seem to make up its mind whether it’s about its protagonist struggling against his own demons or battling the envoys of Hell and thus leaves both feeling underused. The climax is criminally sloppy and underwhelming, mostly because there really isn’t one. It makes a fluid, entertaining combat system and then locks you into repeated linear, ill-thought-out stealth sections without any margin of error.
And almost every single game element can be traced back somewhere else, though of course the most noteworthy influence (as with its predecessor) is a more polished God of War. Mercury Storm are generally evolutionary rather than revolutionary, and nothing in LoS2 is treading new ground aside from the option to disable quick-time events.
It’s the eve of the Apocalypse, and the vampire lord Dracula – formerly the heroic knight Gabriel Belmont before a truly staggering run of horrid luck – has found the immortality of a vampire’s unlife more torturous than satisfying. After years of futile, lonely lordship over the other creatures of the night he wants to die, but cannot do so – not even the power of God himself will grant him rest. Having antagonized the forces of Hell in his debut game, Dracula is convinced by his passive-aggressive archnemesis, the undying wizard Zobek, to join forces just long enough to thwart the end of the world. In exchange, Zobek promises to give Dracula the true death he craves.
(Even this premise has some undertones of inspired-by-another-game. An often-amoral, monstrous vampire protagonist with lingering heroic tendencies whose selfish motivations drive him to defend the world? Hello, Kain; you’re looking good.)
Of course, there are complications. Like Zobek clearly only wanting Satan out of the way so he can take over the world himself. Or the armor-shrouded being who serves him without question but clearly has his own agenda.
Or the city you’re in being built upon the still-monster-haunted, sapient ruins of Dracula’s castle, infused with his subconscious and empowered by the blood of all his many victims. It seizes control of his loyal minions, and spawns other beings to tempt and taunt its master. And it would rather its suicidal master stay – forever.
Lords of Shadow 2 is rarely less than competent in any of its parts, aside from the ill-thought-out stealth sections. Combat and exploration are simple but satisfying with an enormous arsenal of techniques and various interesting combinations of Dracula’s vampire powers. (For a standout, the Mist Form is at once an invaluable and natural platforming tool, an evasion technique and can be upgraded into an elemental assault; it’s pleasant how much the world opens up once you get it.) The game is also littered with boss battles, few reaching the heights of games like Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance but all exciting (especially thanks to a great orchestral soundtrack).
Traversing Dracula’s castle is as entertaining as the first LoS. The artists put special effort into Dracula’s twisted mental world, and whenever the game shifts back to what’s either the past, its protagonist’s own head or some combination thereof, you’ll find plenty of stirring desolation. Platforming is straightforward, but offers plenty of grandiose vistas. While the modern-day sections’ fusion of Old World metropolis, cyberpunk, and fantasy ruin suggest a darkly appealing style, they also feel far smaller and more banal than the vanished glories of Dracula’s sinister kingdom.
And a few moments in LoS2 really sell the experience of playing a monster. (An early plot sequence where the famished, blood-maddened Dracula is effectively fed an innocent family by Zobek was especially chilling despite its problematic elements; it’s strange that this jaunt into true horror is never quite revisited.) Lore documents suggest a world where a massive magical conflict and monsters of the night are unquestioned historic fact, and one where monsters have even more reason to fear than mortals. A few scenes between Dracula and the shades of his lost family are even mildly touching, and to its credit the game does sell the idea that its protagonist is a scarred and stained man in desperate need of redemption, not merely a badass.
Almost inevitably these bright spots take place in the past; the present criminally underutilizes Patrick Stewart’s quietly sadistic Zobek and the soft-voiced Victor Belmont, and the Satanic acolytes they’ve joined forces to battle are neither charismatic enough in design or dialogue to be memorably diabolical nor given nearly enough screentime to become complex. Dracula’s redemption ultimately suffers for having to compete with by-rote scenes of battling cackling, one-dimensional monsters. There’s the seeds of a really compelling story here, much more than the simple end-of-the-world-yarn we got.
But even this level of failed ambition is refreshing, because many of Lords of Shadow 2’s contemporaries save their flights of fancy for exercises in justification: zombies, modern conventional land wars between major powers or casting the United States as scrappy underdogs.
An immortal vampire alternating between battles with Satan’s minions and percussive maintenance on his manifested subconscious is both classic Castlevania nonsense and art-house B-movie schlock. Sometimes that’s all you want – not complex mechanics, not intricate plots, not deep characterization, just a simple, ludicrous fantasy. If you’re in the mood to relive your Goth years, you could do much worse than Lords of Shadow 2.