It has nothing to do with the first Bloodlines, and the Masquerade is more of an inconvenience they remember sometimes to reference. That leaves vampires, and yes: There are at least vampires. The world looks nice, and the music is actually great. Traversal is fun. Every thing else...bland to awful. Combat and the story fall in the first category, NPCs and the "quests" in the latter. It's a linear spectacle brawler without the spectacle. The most game A Chinese Room ever made, and their worst writing.
..we might reach groundlevel with the next one. Still good pixelart, still sluggish and sloppy controls. Even worse when you are in a mech, Still awful hitboxes. The worst part by far is the music, tho. 5s of the most generic metal looping over an over gets really grating, and really fast.
The game is a series of combat arenas and overall looks and plays fine for it's time. While the levels seem to be pretty open and explorable, the game goes out of it's way to block you in with invisible walls and deathplanes (looking at you, Hospital). The physics can be quite janky at times, especially involving the dash move: It seems like it interacts weirdly with the height axis. You might randomly die from full health when trying to dash down stairs, or end up on top of an open door you tried to charge through.
..plays awful. When the actual "game" part is the afterthought
They actually build a decent metroidvania around those cutscenes. With everything form the art to controls to structure evoking those old games, it's a bit of a bummer the two difficulties available from the start are so laughable easy. This isn't an exaggeration, you literally have unlimited lives and continues, and if you die you get set back like half a screen and healed to full. On "casual" the enemies even drop health, so if you generally heal back the damage you took right after. It really feels like "heroic" and onward were the intended way to play. Nonetheless, if you try to get a 100% on your first run without looking things up you get a good 5-6 hours out of it, later you are looking at about 1-1,5h per run. The only real big criticism would be that it's often impossible to distinguish between foreground and background, but even that is true to the source material
A short solitaire reskin with a couple of new mechanics sprinkled in...and it heavily relies on the luck of the draw. You are always just one restart away from beating a stage in 2 turns instead of being beaten. Time flies anyway, tho. If you like the genre and it's <5€ you might as well, otherwise I can't recommend it.
..and dogshit combat. The NES-Castlevania-like movement needs some getting used to, and even then the weird hurtboxes of enemy attacks and small damage opportunity windows are infuriating. Made worse by design decisions like resource refills and save benches all being separate, for estus, poison and each ammunition type. (Does poison actually do anything but coloring the enemy's healthbars purple?). The upper limit of 99 for both crafting resources is also really low, and some things costing up to 80. Getting the resources isn't hard, you just can't store them. That brings us to another issue: ITS. NOT. A. SIDE. QUEST. IF. ITS. MANDATORY. FOR. PROGRESSION. At several points in the game you need money to progress, and the only way to get that are the "side quests": Backtrack and kill something, return to quest board, repeat. 3-4 times, per instance of that happening. Which is quite often. The item system is also..peculiar. There are bars for defense, attack, resists and weight. Since there are no numerical values you can't really tell if for example a higher resist value would be worth a certain loss of defense, and vice versa. There is also a certain one handed hammer you can get from a(n optional?) fight pretty early in the game that just has a maxed out damage bar, making all future drops in that slot worthless? Didn't complete the game at the time of writing, yet at another set of "side quests", again. To earn gold, again.
All upgrades buyable with the same basic currency, number go up for each and every weapon and skill. DPS-Check bosses. Levelgeneration like a cerealbox-maze. Die Übersetzung ist legendär beschissen, Was auch immer dir ursprüngliche Sprache war -> google translate -> englisch -> google translate -> deutsch. Man ofnet Bruste, "Es scheint, dass Sie gut auf meinen Kumpels genommen haben". Aber immerhin "Wir gewinnen".
This game takes a lot of inspiration from DS2, and not always in a good way. Enemies are spongy and can kill you really quick. The distance between a boss arena and the last bonfire is always just a bit too far to feel good, making for very annoying corpse runs. The platforming is VERY weird. The char kind of "snaps" to ledges and walls from a distance you normally wouldn't think possible to grab. Like 5 screens into my first run I managed to grab a ledge through a wall right into the spikes on the other side. The design makes for some great screenshots and gifs...but it wears itself out quit fast, since everything pretty much looks the same. It doesn't help that there are only a handful of different enemies, and that includes reskins. The combat on the other hand is good, attacks are clearly telegraphed, bosses aren't just "normal enemy but bigger" and need some tactics to kill. Story....is wordsalad. As are the item descriptions. An example? "Item gets destroyed on death" would be way too simple and comprehensive. No, it's "Bonestone is nothing else than a bone powder cookie. traditional burial gift to Celestial Mistress. This treat is supposed to ingratiate the deceased one to Her. LEFTOVERS REMAIN UPON IRMA'S DEATH" This whole paragraph is on every item that gets removed when you respawn. The game has very odd performance issues for the first ~15 min every time you start the game, where it sometimes just freezes for a couple of frames, as if loading some assets. One of the earrings bugged out for me, it displayed on the map, but wasn't there. The game never crashed. Overall still a good soulslike platformer with very light metroidvania features, One playthrough is about 10-12 hours
