Do not be fooled by the castlevania title
Coming from someone who's first experience with Castlevania was the second entry in the series, Simon's Quest, I came into HoD with an open mind since like it's predecessor it had an awful lot of negative opinions of the game but experimented with some new gameplay elements much like Zelda 2 for the NES during its time. However I am a huge fan of castlevania who's played all of the metroidvania titles except for Order of Eclesia and loved them.
But let's get down to the point of why this is almost the worst entry of the series in nearly 20 years. First off anyone who has not bought the game during day 1 release will be extremely turned off by its community. For selecting online games you have your standard quick match and custom match. The problem is the custom match only filters out people by region, if you live in the U.S or Japan you can only filter in people from your own country, that's it. There's no option for someone who's new to the game to select level 1 normal for people to join and see before hand that its a newbie game than someone who's collected the best gear in the game who's doing dracula runs on hard mode. The game has an incredibly small community as it is and with situations like this it will turn away most new players on sight who don't have a friend to power level them.
For the gameplay itself it does have potential, you have nearly every major character from the castlevania games from Symphony of the Night to Order of Ecclesia, each with their own unique weapon sets and abilities. This part I will say is the strongest part of the game, especially for anyone who's played the DS games. You can have fun with the game getting a badass new weapon for Alucard or leveling up a spell for shanoa.
There are major design flaws for the online gameplay itself, even if you have someone to power you through a level there's no sense of risk vs reward. Your basically following those people around watching them destroy everything. When you do reach that point where you got the gear your not very far off from World of Warcraft where you can at least run around town and show it off. You also have three different zoom points for the camera, far away for a whole level layout, mid range, and standard like a classic castlevania. The problem is when your zoomed in, anyone who's off camera during multiplayer becomes a portrait on your screen who takes up over twice as much space as your own character. (Edit: There is an option to turn this off under the settings menu) So when you have moments when your trying to dodge medusa heads who turn you into stone or bosses where you have to be zoomed in to see their attack patterns, the game becomes nearly unplayable.
As far as how the graphics and sound measure up, the sprites and animations are nearly straightly ripped from previous entries of the series, down to backgrounds, etc. It's hard to find anything new that you haven't seen before if your a Castlevania fan. The soundtrack is incredibly weak as well.
The only way I could recommend Castlevania HoD for 1200 microsoft points is that you had already bought the other four games during the XBLA summer of arcade which are all much better games and technically you were getting the game for free.
