The extended home video release of the movie Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story had a pretty amusing branding beyond simply the regular “unrated” label. It was, rather, called “The Unbearably Long Self-Indulgent Director’s Cut.” It was a good joke for a parody of music biopics, but it was also a nice jab at media in general.
That label would also be used well on copies of Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 (just not as a joke), because Mercury Steam completely lost its handle on how to present a game well, and the result is a hodgepodge of too many ideas and too much weirdness thrown at the player all at once, before the player is then forced to work their way through endless sequences in which all those elements are displayed haphazardly.
And on top of that, I’m not exactly sure why this game even exists, given the story being told. Lords of Shadow 2 serves as the capper of a trilogy that consists of the original Lords of Shadow and the 3DS title Mirror of Fate. It’s part of that story out of desperation, though; at the conclusion of the first game, our hero became Dracula, and in Mirror of Fate his son and grandson hunted him down and killed him.
But now Dracula is back in search of permanent rest, but needs to put down Satan first. And this happens in the present day in a city built on the ruins of Castlevania. Cool. Whatever. I don’t understand why this story is being told, but I’m always down for a fun appropriation of religious lore in fiction. Let’s do this.
Lords of Shadow 2 doesn’t disappoint in the strange ways it borrows from Catholicism, but just as with everything else in this game, it’s wrought with excess that ruins the excitement of the experience. There are just too many different weird concepts introduced too often with very little attention paid to each thing.
This is an issue because of the strange mixture of gameplay that seems intent from the beginning on disrupting the story’s pace. The individual pieces are intriguing on their own, but Mercury Steam brought them together in a pretty annoying way.
Mostly, LOS2 is a puzzle-platformer adventure game, and in each moment it acts like that it tends to be pretty satisfying. The platforming is not about skill, but timing and discovering where to go and what to do. It will have many a section leaving you wondering how to approach a situation for more than a couple minutes. But at times it tries to sabotage you out of negligence.
You may, for example, find yourself in the middle of a puzzle when a directional marker will show up on the mini-map pointing at a closed door, leaving you thinking the next step is through it even though solving the puzzle is the only way to open it. That particular example might have been a bug, but it’s emblematic of the way the game doesn’t adequately train you to use its myriad mechanics, not in the least because it spends more time training you to fight than do other things.
And yet while Lords of Shadow 2 is a game that contains fighting, it is not a game about fighting. It is a game of many different mechanics, all of which are good on their own out of context — the combat in particular would be quite brilliant for a hack-n-slash title were the fights with non-bosses not presented seemingly only out of obligation. The boss fights are good, and the fights with mixed groups of baddies are usually interesting, but the more typical arbitrary battle with three or four of one type of monster is always boring — and that last category doesn’t even seem present in order to stimulate, but rather to just be there, another obstacle between you and getting through this thing.
If Lords of Shadow 2 were a film, I’d say it’s well constructed in every way aside from editing. Unfortunately, editing is as crucial to a movie being watchable as its visibility. So for this game, it’s all well and good that it’s pieces are of quality, but they are arranged so carelessly and without regard to flow that struggle is more about staying awake than merely making progress. This subfranchise’s muted tone — another non-flaw out of context — doesn’t help that cause.
What this effort becomes, as a result, is a 10,000-piece jigsaw puzzle Mercury Steam tried to put together, but after five minutes of struggle they declared, “Screw this,” and started jamming pieces together through brute force. That’s a lot of effort wasted on making those pieces.
Final Verdict
5/10
A copy of the game was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.
