Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

Overall Bloodstained is mediocre, but some parts are outright bad. The worst part of Bloodstained for me are the boss fights. I disliked them so much that I just sat next to the bosses, spamming flame breath in their face while chugging potions. Balance is also totally absent. 5% Of spells and weapons are godlike, while the remaining 95% is garbage. Most areas are extremely easy, but some are hard in an annoying way. The game is impossible to complete without a guide, so get used to alt tabbing. Immersive right? Immersion doesn't matter anyway, because the story and characters are uninteresting. Luckily most of the story can be skipped. Normally a mediocre game would receive three out of five stars, but there is huge competition in the metroidvania genre, and one does not have to search far to find competitors that are just better in every single way. Even the old Castlevanias are all better. With no innovations at all and so many better games, Bloodstained has no reason to exist.

What I mean by that are the basic actions in the game, they are horribly outdated, they weren't that great even in the old days, even in Castlevania Symphony of the Night, attacking around enemies moving left and right feels awkward. What also doesn't help, are how either the game designers didn't understand the capabilities of the players, or didn't care at all, because I guess you have Shards, Power ups. If so. Why do I have a melee weapon? why not just make the whole game based on this caster character, why let a flawed and not even functional sense of tradition, stand in the way of making something more interesting and dare I say, more Fun to play with? We could have had instead of melee weapons, the Guns, a mix of a spell caster with guns as her main weapon. I don't know, I can see the argument for melee weapons, the Rapiers are neat and fun to use, as they offer a great deal of mobility, which is how this kind of game works best I would say, but the damage weapons deal, the health that enemies have, the damage Miriam takes from almost all attacks, which is much higher to a ludicrous extent to a game like SotN, as well as the capabilities, extension, directional aim and allowing of movement for directional shards that you get, it's easy to see which one choice of attack is the clear winner here, at least as far as which one makes for a more fun game to play. Whenever I use weapons from magic, I feel like I'm going back to a worse play style. This is why I'm giving it 2 stars. The game just feels like a relic already, not because of the samey levels, but because all the gameplay flaws that existed before are all present in this one too, a general over reliance on overpowered/cheesing tactics. Levels I can forgive, choices are great, but if the gameplay of a Videogame isn't enjoyable, it's just a shame for all the other work. The one thing that I enjoyed in all this, the Zangetsu fights.

First the good things: the player character is cool Now the bad stuff: 1) If you like classic castlevania like castlevania4 you probably won't like this game. This game has the same colorpalette as candy crush, it's colorful, anime-stylish. It is not gloomy and not atmospheric in the slightest. It feels more like a simple mainstream anime-series. The monster design is out of place and many monster are just some uninspired black goo. 2) The video settings are a joke. You can choose from 3 different 16:9 resolutions. The game is neither past nor future proof. 3) There is a massive audio bug that makes the game unplayable unless you mute it. When I lower the resolution to 20% the audio screeching and stuttering gets even worse... I am playing on: LENOVO IdeaPad S540 Win10 i7 Prozessor 12 GB RAM 1 TB SSD GeForce MX250

I have 80% of the map and start farming and It's fun, BUT, what is not fun is losing all your progress because random crash when farming of after killing a boss and losing ALL, in the more than 10+ hrs that I played this game I suffer like 5 random crash, which 3 was when I was farming shards and use by re-entering a room, and the other 2 when I exit a boss room and I use the elevator. Another bug is when you kill an enemy and it was on a weird position (inside terrain or on a ramp) and you will lose the item it drops. The game has good mechanics with a little weird control responses movement and skills (already tested de control option btw and use a Xbox controller), nice style, a diferent style of plays wich adapts for what you like most. I like the game and without the bugs I will rate it with 2-3 stars, only because of the time and effort wasted because bugs and day one DLC.

Good.