Note: Although this was posted in November the game itself was played in October.
SCHLOCKTOBER '21:This October I played a number of games with Halloween appropriate themes, focusing on older and less appreciated games in my backlog. These aren't necessarily horror games but rather games with strong horror elements. I've decided to blog about these games and whether I think they're still worth playing as a seasonal treat or the gaming equivalent of an apple full of razor blades.
Lords of Shadow 2 has a terrible reputation. Having played through the first game and even the Xbox 360 port of the 3DS game I thought that even if the game was mediocre it would be the same kind of enjoyable mediocre that those titles were. This is a game by Mercury Steam, the team behind the new universally praised Metroid Dread. I can have fun with old, flawed, games, and I thought I would have fun with Lords of Shadow 2.
I didn’t.
Lords of Shadow 2 takes up where the first game leaves off, with you controlling a newly awoken Dracula in what turns out to be a slightly futuristic world. The acolytes of Satan are conducting a ritual to bring him back, and the only person powerful enough to stop him is Dracula. Except that Dracula’s long slumber has damaged his memory and stripped him of his powers so first you must power him back up so he can take on the literal devil and save the world.
Dracula pretty much only has two consistent characteristics in the Castlevania series. He’s extremely powerful and he’s extremely evil. This game promises you a chance to finally control the biggest baddy of them all, only to turn you into a hero and make you weak. It’s a baffling decision, made even more baffling by turning Dracula into the doting father of a ghost boy he never knew in life. In the two prior Lords of Shadow games it’s established that the character’s wife died before he was Dracula and shortly after giving birth to a son, Trevor, who was taken to be raised by the Brotherhood. Dracula never met this child until he became an adult man and tried to destroy his vampiric father. Throughout Lords of Shadow 2 Dracula pursues a Trevor who appears to be 11 or 12 years old, and play father to him. Trevor is stand offish towards Dracula and prefers his ghostly mother…who he also never knew! This is made even more confusing because we know what happened to Trevor and he shouldn’t even have a ghost. Is this a delusion, an apparition of some sort, a metaphor? I have no idea, but it feels like a very strange retcon of the first two games in the series and it helped make the story feel flat and Dracula’s characterization unclear. If I wasn’t going to get to play as a strong and evil Dracula then a version of Dracula that continued the themes and story of the first two games would have been okay, but this strange doting father Dracula was impossible to connect with.
Also impossible to connect with was the game’s map. Instead of being divided up into individual levels you choose from a map screen the game now functions as a pseudo-open world, where you can backtrack and take shortcuts to reach previous areas, and there are some fast travel options you unlock. This leans into the legacy of Castlevania and the various Metroidvania games in the series, but the problem is that the world they made is not very fun to navigate. It’s a bunch of tight corridors and it’s extremely confusing in many places (multiple times I had to look up a walkthrough to figure out where to go or where in the room the handhold I had to jump to was hidden, which is something I almost never do when playing games) and visually monotonous. There are also lots of transition rooms where you need to ride an elevator or wait to be “decontaminated” before moving to the next area and while these were clearly done to mask loading times they make backtracking a massive pain in the neck (Dracula pun intended.) You can partially excuse this by it being a 360/PS3 game, except it was released in 2014, after the release of the PS4 and XBONE, and well after plenty of 360/PS3 games had shown that true open worlds were very possible on that generation of consoles. The graphics are gorgeous and detailed and it runs well (at least on the Series X) so maybe you can still excuse it because of how visually demanding the game is, but then they should have added many more fast travel points to make going back and picking up collectables less torturous. I only backtracked when the critical path demanded it because it just wasn’t worth bothering otherwise.
This weird and claustrophobic map doesn’t even make sense by its own rules. At one point there’s an extended action sequence on a fast moving train. By 2014 this was already a well worn trope but plenty of games make good use of it. However when you get off the train after this long and speedy ride you find yourself only a few blocks away from where you started in the game’s open world. It just compounds how cramped and staged the city feels. You can also, at certain points, travel back to Dracula’s castle, which exists in a sort of hazy outside time state that’s never explained. The castle is its own open world, connected to the city in certain places, and each of them features map rooms that can be used for fast travel, but the whole convoluted set up makes getting anywhere specific an enormous pain in the butt, especially if you want to go from city to castle or the other way around. I much preferred the linear levels selected from a map the first game had. Not only was there vastly more environmental diversity in that game (the first few chapters alone featured swamps, forests, towns, ruins, icy lakes etc…) but paradoxically it was easier to get back to somewhere to collect something because you just selected the relevant level and played through it until you reached the right point. Finding your way in the second game’s open world is much worse.
The reasons for changing the combat are equally understandable, but also cause the game to play worse than its predecessor. The biggest alteration is that you now have free control of the camera with the right stick. This is something that I wanted in Lords of Shadow 1 but…it doesn’t work well. The camera defaults to behind Dracula’s back but the biggest problem is that the cramped environments in which the game takes place often mean that the camera gets stuck in corners or zoomed in so much that you can’t see around you. The game is stacked full of enemies with unblockable attacks, up to half a dozen at a time, and dodging is completely necessary to survive, but the camera moves when you dodge so it’s constantly jerking around and you are constantly losing track of enemies. It’s not unplayable but it’s incredibly annoying, which extends to the rest of combat as well.
The next major issue is that this game wants you to use complex button press combos but you never have enough time to actually pull them off and the best way to survive is to keep in constant motion using quick hit and run tactics. Your attacks often don’t stun enemies, meaning that the combat has no real feeling of impact as you whale away at bad guys with flurries of blows and they will just start blocking mid string (they block a lot. A lot!) or fire off a counter-attack. It’s not difficult because enemy attacks don’t do much damage and it’s easier to reach a “focus” state and recharge your magic (after you land a certain number of hits without taking damage enemies start dropping spheres you can use to recharge magic) than it was in the first game, and also because enemies now enter a stunned state prior to death where you can execute them for a health bonus. But combat never feels good or smooth and even using hit and run tactics and perfect blocks you often end up getting juggled yourself by swarms of enemies attacking from multiple angles and often using projectiles.
A related problem is that the game throws tons of mechanics at you and most of them don’t really matter. Like in the first game you have light and dark magic, with the light magic healing you when you score hits and the dark magic doing more damage. The system has been tweaked so that now when you engage the light magic your weapon turns from a whip into a sword and the dark magic manifests as claws. Each of these weapons has their own skill set (so if you want to use the game’s EXP system to buy a combo that lets you do more damage after a perfect block if you hammer on the strong attack button you need to buy that combo for each of the three weapons separately) and each now comes with its own projectile: a dagger, a freeze attack, or a bomb. In addition you now have a bunch of consumables that you can use to do things like fully heal, recharge your magic, slow time, or find secrets. It’s a lot to keep track of and the game tries to incentivize using the mechanics by doing things like throwing shielded enemies at you whose shields you can break using dark magic, or enemies that can dodge your attacks unless you hit them with a freeze projectile. The problem is that the game can’t actually rely on you having access to any specific type of magic at any given time, so none of this is mandatory, and then because it’s not mandatory it’s not particularly useful, since enemies are designed not to be cakewalks even if you do have the right magic. So there are enemies with shields who will automatically retreat if you start hitting them with dark magic, or enemies you are supposed to freeze but who can still pose a substantial danger while frozen.
All this means that while the combat is in theory quite complex, much of that complexity is not really relevant and given how complicated the controls can be and how much is going on at any given time it’s easier to ignore it and just rely on the same tactics against everything. That, in turn, makes the fighting in the game monotonous. This is a problem because a huge percentage of your time will be spent in combat, especially later in the game.
Of course it’s not all combat, and the game also does feature some traversal. Unfortunately this has also been downgraded from the first game. Because the art has become so much more complicated and pretty much everything is dark colored and in low light, the game compensates by highlighting handholds with smoke and fluttering bats. This means that most of the traversal stuff just involves jumping at a cloud of bats and then making your way from handhold to handhold. In a few places the bats don’t propagate properly, and it’s almost impossible to figure out, thus, as I said earlier, I had to look things up. Unlike in the first game you don’t have a whip to hang from, and there are very few jumping areas that rely on timing or puzzle elements, so it all feels perfunctory. There are also fewer actual puzzles than in the first game, and when they do pop up from time to time they’re remarkably easy. Everything has been streamlined to the point of triviality.
The biggest addition to the gameplay is stealth, and it takes two forms, both of which are quite bad. The first and more common type of stealth involves giant enemies called Golgoth Guards. These are slow, huge, bad guys who Dracula cannot take on directly and who have massive cannons that kill him in a couple hits. The way you get around them is either by turning into a swarm of rats and avoiding them, or using a bat swarm ability to distract them so you can sneak up and possess their bodies, which lets you control one in a lurching zombie walk for a minute or so before it explodes in blood, revealing Dracula. You encounter them about half a dozen times through the game and they function like stealth puzzles with one solution. The rules in these sections, such as how far the guards can see, feel inconsistent and they’re more tedious than anything else. Devoting two of your main abilities (rat swarm and bat swarm) to these tiny segments is a bizarre choice. You do use the rat swarm in a few places to find collectables or go through secret paths, but since you can only transform into or out of the rat swarm in a few specific locations in the game it doesn’t add much. This rat stealth is one of the main reasons people cite for disliking the game but while it’s not fun or good, it’s also a small portion of the game and it’s not that hard to figure out what to do.
There are also two stealth sections where you hide from bosses while they search for you. These are more frustrating and annoying, but also relatively short. They also serve to further disempower Dracula, who starts the game as a warrior king defending his castle and then finds himself skulking around hiding from his foes lest they kill him in a couple hits. Ironically Dracula gets in boss battles against these enemies immediately after the insta-kill stealth sections, which illustrates the way the game arbitrarily varies Dracula’s strength and abilities throughout its running time depending on the designers’ whims.
So if the gameplay is so-so, the story is a miss, and the open world isn’t much fun to explore what positives does the game have? It’s very pretty for a 7th gen game, with extremely detailed textures and some pretty good boss designs. The performances by the voice actors are good, though we get a lot less of Patrick Stewart than we did in the first game, which is a shame. The sound and music are of a high quality. It’s not a terrible game and there are moments when the combat is fun or you’re doing an interesting puzzle or story bit when it’s definitely enjoyable. It just has too many flaws and while it feels more coherent than the first game it lacks that title’s scope, variety, and sense of adventure.
A Note on the DLC: Like Lords of Shadow 1, Lords of Shadow 2 has a short DLC chapter. It features one of the supporting characters from the main game rather than Dracula and all takes place in Dracula’s castle. While the story isn’t particularly interesting, it switches up the gameplay considerably. You have a sword instead of a whip, making your attacks shorter and faster and some new special abilities including the power to transform into a spectral wolf, but the biggest change is the much greater focus on puzzles rather than combat. The DLC is built around several long, intricate, puzzles and it’s a good change of pace from the main game. It also features some of the most striking environments in Lords of Shadow 2 and made me wonder if this would have been a better game if it focused on Dracula’s castle instead of the city. The DLC is pretty short for the price they’re asking, but might have been my favorite part of the game.
Schlocktober Rating: Unsatisfying Schlock
Lords of Shadow 2 is far from the worst game I’ve played, but it’s only fitfully enjoyable. It takes the incredible premise set up by the first game’s bonkers ending and does nothing interesting with it either mechanically or in terms of story. Even its impressive aesthetics lack any kind of coherent vision. If it were a Halloween candy it would be wax vampire teeth. Yeah they look cool and novel but when you bite into them they just taste like wax and they get boring pretty quickly. It’s a shame that this was the last major Castlevania game
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