So uhh, the game that probably not a lot of people played recently received a new DLC update. I didn't see any release trailer or any news on Giant Bomb - even Steam doesn't have it in new releases. It was pointed out to me that it was simply available, so I got it.
In short it's not very good.
For something called Revelations, there is a significant lack thereof. If you've seen trailers for this, then there you go, no need to play it, because thats all there is to it. You take on the role of Alucard (thats Dracula backwards by the way) and are tasked with retrieving Gabriels weapons from the evil castle in which he resides. You know, it's the sentient castle from the main game that is scared Dracula is gonna finally grow up, get a real apartment and move out? Cause who wouldn't want to live in a sentient ruin with constantly bleeding walls and switches activated by jamming your hand into some spike, or likewise painful contraption. Well Alucard is more than happy to do this for his father and thats the entire premise of this, ehhh 90 minute (?) long DLC. Although throughout this experience you might keep asking yourself: why wouldn't Alucard just leave the weapons by Gabriels sarcophagus so our weakened prince of darkness can quickly retrieve them upon waking up as opposed to scattering them to the furthest reaches of the castle? A revelation that was sadly not explored.
Alucard doesn't have a lot of new moves in terms of combat as his attack strings are basically identical to Gabriels. You do get some new special abilities once you upgrade his sword far enough the tech tree, but this would require you to actually spend time in the game far beyond the actual running time of the story, which isn't a great proposition.
The DLC is mainly puzzle focused which highlights Alucards new traversal powers, all of which are awkward in some way or another. You can now "teleport" to nearby handholds by turning into a swarm of bats, move back time for specific objects to repair them, or turn into a wolf to jump over bigger gaps. Both the teleport and the time ability require you to hold down the right trigger and scan your surroundings for objects to which you can either teleport to or which you can repair. This quickly turns the game into a Metroid-like experience of walking into rooms and scanning your surroundings to look for anything you can interact with. The puzzles themselves aren't very fun and constructed in a very tedious manner. For instance there is a place with an elevator (yes, the proud family tradition of super powerful beings riding elevators continues) that is operated by two wind up keys that you need to reach by "platforming" up to them. You watch Alucard wind up the key, then you watch the elevator slowly ride up, you jump down, climb to the other side, wind the other key, oops you let go by accident, ok go back to the other side, wind the key, watch the elevator go down.. This design is all over the place where you have a limited amount of time to do something and when that time ends you're left having to backtrack and watch the same animations again before you can attempt to solve it. I was also never quite sure where to go, or where I realistically could go. You can still see small swarms of bats above handholds, but it's never quite clear when you can teleport to them. Sometimes it's right above you and the reticule just won't pop up, sometimes you can barely see it and it shows up. It's all very arbitrary for the sake of keeping the structure of the puzzle, and this makes you feel very lost.
All in all Revelations is pretty poor DLC and it's only saving grace is that it's relatively cheap. If Lords of Shadow 2 gave off the feeling that the really talented part of Mercury Steam got fed up and left halfway through development, then Revelations is very clearly a product made by the remaining half of the studio. It is shallow, tedious and offers nothing new or especially interesting in terms of story development. As much as I enjoyed a large part of the core game despite it's flaws, there is just no sugar coating anything here.
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