Co-op gaming has seen quite a boon over the last several years. No longer are we restricted to specific types of games in order to get a co-op fix. Left 4 Dead threw four players together in a massive zombie slaughter, and gained critical acclaim. Final Fight: Double Impact re-introduced gamers to the joys of mindless arcade beat ‘em up action, which was a staple in multiplayer gameplay throughout a large portion of the 90′s. Gamers were finally being presented with not just sports games, first person shooter deathmatches, racing games and fighting titles as their multiplayer fix; returning and original concepts have been flowing in.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, we have Castlevania, a franchise that has had a predominant single player presence throughout its existence. Throughout its history, whether it stuck to its side-scroller, stiff jumping mechanics of the 8 and 16 bit era, or its metamorphosis into more of an action RPG hybrid in its most current form, the solitude gameplay wasn’t always a lonely venture, as the challenges and collectibles that awaited you were of an addictive nature. Although titles such as Castlevania; Dawn of Sorrow and Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin on the Nintendo DS (we’ll forget that abhorrent fighting game on the Nintendo Wii) did add co-op components to it, the franchise has yet to see an installment that was dedicated to the co-op gaming experience.
Enter Castlevania: Harmony of Despair on the Xbox 360 via the Xbox Live Arcade. This is the first attempt at putting a focus of multiplayer gaming within the franchise, allowing five selectable characters — Alucard (from Symphony of the Night), Shanoa (Order of the Ecclesia) Charlotte Aulin and Jonathan Morris (Portrait of Ruin) and Soma Cruz (Aria of Sorrow, Dawn of Sorrow). Up to six players can participate in six vastly different stages, collecting loot, defeating enemies, and cultivating in an epic boss battle. As you can tell, Harmony of Despair is definitely amultiplayer experience, and the first that’s not focused on a single player build. This will be apparent when you attempt to get your feet wet by entering the single player game, as you quickly realize that you’ll need at least one extra person in order to find anything worthwhile., or spend a chunk of time online, gaining formidable gear for what awaits you (end tally was near 15 hours before I had the proper gear to completely solo Normal).
If you’re a single player gamer with a preference of playing any kind of co-op enabled game alone, your lone wolf mentality will make you rethink your decision with Castlevania HD. From top to bottom, this is a game built around a multiplayer journey. While the first stage may take a few attempts to complete, succeeding stages will be an overburdening run through, often leading to cheap deaths during boss battles. It’s a loot centric game, meaning that you’ll need every upgrade you can get to better your chances at success, however you’ll only feel like you’re on the winning side of things when you acquire the aid of at least one other player.
Adding in anywhere from one to five extra characters will start to unveil the true success of Castlevania HD. You’ll start at one of a handful of designated starting points throughout the map, hacking, slashing and casting through a myriad of some of the more famous monsters that have appeared from Symphony of the Night and on. With two players, you’ll feel like you have a greater command of each stage you enter. With six, not only are confidence levels raised, but you stand a much stronger chance at seeing the following stage, so long as everyone plays it smart.
Speaking of which, you will encounter some points in Castlevania HD that take more than repeated presses of the X button to complete. The third stage boss is a gigantic creature with several points of interest across its decrepit body. You can wail away at its highlighted knee caps from a higher ledge all you want, but you’ll only disintegrate the point of interest without taking the behemoth down. You’ll need to attack a gear that controls a giant hammer, slowly winding the hammer into place, all the while you’re avoiding flying gremlin creatures that constantly respawn upon death. Once the hammer is in place, have another person pull the switch, delivering a massive power blow to the creatures true weak point. It’s little touches like these that keeps you thinking, and gives that notion that every single person in the area has some sort of importance to the progression of the crew.
With five characters to choose from, you’ll have a wide array of styles to choose from. Alucard has his familiar triple fireball attack, as well as a brief transformation into a wolf when sliding. Soma Cruz can absorb enemy souls and utilize them in different manners. There’s a great amount of diversity, and definitely a character that will suit the style of just about anyone that plays Castlevania HD.
As mentioned earlier, this is a loot centric game, and the better gear you acquire, the better chance you’ll have at not only surviving longer, but destroying the opposition is a timely manner. You can gain loot by either purchasing them at designated points in the game, or coming across a treasure chest. Loot a chest, and no matter where the other plays are in the castle, they will gain a random item. Early on you’ll come across quite a few upgrades, giving you a rather generous stream of gear and weaponry. More than likely though, you’ll find that items you purchase will yield greater benefits to your character, offering not only damage and defense increases, but bonuses to other stats, such as strength or elemental resistances. Playing each character will unlock different equipment that can be used between characters, offering a wider range of items that can be unlocked and utilized during battle.
Unfortunately, you won’t have the freedom to equip these new pieces at will. Before each stage, you can access the shop to buy newer items, or sell the stockpile of meager drops that you’ll accumulate rather quickly. Once you enter the stage, you’ll come across these shrines with a book floating above it that let you hit RT to access your equipment screen, as well as the shops you previously viewed before the start of the stage. These scattered areas are the only locations that you can stop, swap out gear and visit shops.
While it would seem like utilizing a pause menu to set your equipment would be more beneficial, you’ll realize why this is not possible: you cannot pause the game whatsoever. Hit the guide button on your controller and the action continues. Press start and while you’ll bring up your mostly useless pause menu, friend and foe alike will continue to march through the castle, leaving you open to a possible assault from a random enemy in the room. This seems to be a new trend in Xbox Live Arcade titles, one that Final Fight: Double Impact seemed to have brought to the forefront. While it is understandable that pausing during a multiplayer session of either game wouldn’t work well, not being able to pause on a single player venture is inexcusable.
One can argue that the lack of a pause can be negated by just standing in a previously cleared area or any safe area in general. Unfortunately, you have a timer that’s constantly counting down. While it sounds like thirty minutes might be a more than generous amount of time on your side, you’ll soon realize that a lot of these stages have some confusing layouts, requiring you to really pay attention, or grind through each stage repeatedly in order for you to fully understand the layout. During multiplayer sessions, the time will be affected by the death of any player, though even with that notion, Castlevania HD is much more tolerable, not to mention much more engaging with multiple players venturing through the stage.
Many have complained about the lack of direction that you get when first jumping into Castlevania HD. While the Help & Options selection on the main menu will give you the gist of how to play, it doesn’t explain a few important aspects, mainly how to replenish your health. Throughout each stage you’ll encounter a couple of instant use food items that will restore bit of health, and sometimes provide a stat boost. However at no point are you told that you have to equip a consumable healing item in order for you to heal yourself at any given time. You can only equip one kind of healing agent, and up to three of that particular item, and can only equip this at the designated equipment areas through each stage. This is a major oversight of explanation, one that word of mouth will more than always help remedy. Basic mechanics are explained on the Controls portion of the Help & Options, so that shouldn’t be a worry. How one would forget to explain to the players how to heal themselves though, that’s unforgiving.
Visually, Castlevania HD seems to have adopted a plethora of layouts found in previous Castlevania titles, as well as the enemy models. The quality has been enhanced considerably, but the essence of it all seems a bit too familiar to those that have played through even one of the more recent Castlevania titles. On the “normal” view, which is the traditional up close view, characters look quite pixelated, while retaining just about all of the frames of animation they had previously. The backgrounds made the transition over in a more commendable fashion, though the sense of déjà vu does taint the experience some. You can push the view out to three different positions: the default view Castlevania fans are accustomed to, a view that gets a good look at a modest portion of the stage, and the complete view, which renders everything you see into the most minute sizes, showing where everyone is at any given time, as well as the layout overall. Each view will be used quite often, with the middle view not only providing a better sense of detail (thanks to the perspective not being zoomed in completely) but offers a fine balance between field of view and attention to detail.
The audio offering is much weaker than Castlevania fans would expect. The generic sounding music, both on the menu screen and in game, tries to emulate the stylish compositions that many of the previous games incorporated, but ultimately ends up flat. While the sound effects retain the quality we’ve come to expect, but the voices could have used a bit of care to them. The grunts and yells all work for what they are intended, but the quick chat voice clips, which admittedly isn’t quite useful anyway, just don’t do the characters they represent justice.
Solo or multiplayer, you’ll run into little to no setbacks with the controls. Each character could stand to move a bit faster, but it’s not much of a worry. Weapons have their own delay on attack, forcing you to think carefully about which weapons you’ll want to bring along for a particularly difficult boss battle. The only real quirk with the controls comes when you attempt to open a treasure chest while in motion. For some reason, it seems like nearly ever time you try to open one of these chests while moving, you’ll bypass, leaving it closed. Running by switches yields a totally opposite effect, as you’ll easily flip over any switch while walking by them. It’s not a major inconvenience, though a bit of an annoyance to have to stop on top of a chest in order for you to gain its treasures.
While the single player portion of Castlevania HD has some major issues with its difficulty, as well as its value in general, the biggest question remains whether or not the 1200 MSP price point is worth spending. With a single player game that’s pretty much useless (unless you co-op through to the last level and then solo through that last level for drops that you can use to beat previous levels on your own), the multiplayer aspect of Castlevania really does shine through. The various styles that each character provides is enough to experiment with and to find who you’ll click with the most.
The problem lies in the available content. While the six stages offered have a lot to explore in total, it’s still six stages. It just doesn’t feel like there’s enough content for your money. Granted, it’s a worthwhile challenge when you’re in the co-op portion, but those six stages are not going to last for very long. Like the Left 4 Dead series, there’s only so many playthroughs of each stage until you grow bored of it all. It really is a different take to a co-op experience, and it’s pretty gratifying taking down Dracula with five other players, but what is available initially, is not enough. Downloadable content looks to be something we can all look forward to, but lets hope it comes sooner rather than later, with a price point that’s fair to all gamers.
Playing co-op in Castlevania: Harmony of Despair will show you that Konami “got it” when it came to bringing their well beloved franchise into a new setting. Having each player act like an important piece to their teams success is definitely a rewarding feeling, along with the defeat of each boss you encounter. The way loot is distributed to the masses via treasure chests helps level the playing field and prevent one player from stealing all of the spoils for themselves. It’s just a shame that there’s not enough offered for its price, as well as a single player portion of the game that is unbalanced, offering a frustrating difficulty level for the lone wolf player, unless you spend enough time in co-op, gear up and watch where you move. While there’s more than meets the eyes with what Harmony of Despair offers (plenty of drops, five characters with diverse play-styles) and it is a very entertaining and enjoyable game on the co-op side of things, it’s hard to justify a rush purchase, even if you have a group of friends that are die hard Castlevania fans. As hard as it is for me to say, especially with some good times via co-op, and with the rating the way it is, I cannot fully recommend a purchase of Harmony of Despair. Stick with Symphony of the Night if you want to sink your teeth into a Castlevania related title on the 360.
Rating: 6.5
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