Castlevania: SotN 4+

Let’s go back to when this title hit America!
This is really the best game ever made hands down (90s), and this is what transformed so many other games to replicate its authenticity! And yet Nothing can beat it because it is what fans wanted in all the other games? they will never replicate it and meet its match. Even if this game came out on the current phones we have now, Yes I approve of this game no matter what.
It’s my love life and success I had as a kid and remembered all the sweat and sleepless nights achieving the most difficult of bosses and actually using my wits to improve my skills as a gamer. And actually studied and talked with friends about skills to use and actually learning spells through guides and handbooks that didn’t come out til new game magazines gave us hints and tricks to learn that YES more stuff in the castle was to be explored!!!!!! And yet. As an adult looking back at this game and downloading it made me look at my childhood and see what I have become today. Sure problems are here and there on this download and touching the screen and not enhancing the screen bigger and making the graphics a tide more tighter to today’s standards would help it. But I just want to say thank you for releasing this title to my hands. As I can see my inner childhood grow brighter!

The game is fun, challenging, and best of all, let’s you skip the story to just enjoy the exploration and hunting. A few irks:

1. The save system is really weird. I’ve saved, chosen rather explicitly the “overwrite data” option, and still found that my game wasn’t saved. The continue option seems to work as long as the app isn’t closed in the background, which is fine as long as you don’t switch to some other task / restart your phone.

2. The touch controls are terrible, to the point that it forced me to get a physical controller. My guess is that this was just a straight port from a console (I stopped following console systems when everything moved to Call of Duty clones a decade ago) with little to no exploration of how to make it more touch friendly. There are plenty of metroidvania games on iOS that have figured out touch controls.

3. When you die (and at least for me, I die frequently) I have to sit and watch a cheesy screen that seems like it was drawn and written by a 12-year old Japanese boy (“let us go the night for pleasure, the night is young”) and you cannot clear it quickly. You have to wait like 10 seconds, just staring at that screen. Like, why? Get out of my face and go away. Let me tap a button to go back to the menu.

4. The menu system is pretty terrible (hooray Japanese OS, did they hire the folks from Sony to make this menu?)

Points 1 and 3 are bugs, IMO, the other two are just due to a phoned-in port.

I’m sure other reviews have said this but the game is a great port and I’m looking forward to getting into it... as soon as they fix the awful controls (or lack thereof). You can’t just slap the imprint of an old school control controller, make its activation areas hypersensitive and call it a day. The game feels clunky, unresponsive and needlessly difficult with its current movement system. Please add controller support as well as on screen customization and button mapping. The left thumb movement pad should not be fixed. This alone would infinitely improve the game. It’ll get 5 stars once they update.

Update: Still waiting for them to fix the controls. No reason not to given all the complaints.

Second update: So I realized they really designed this to be used with an external controller. You need to buy a Bluetooth controller and download an app that allows you to customize your controllers input and locations. Something like ShootingPlusV3. With those two additional times this game was a real treat. I’m giving it 5 stars now. But really, they should have said something about using a controller!