Another knock being that this was a Kickstarter game and not slave to the impossible demands of a AAA release schedule. It’s not as shameful as some other day 1 releases like Dark Souls on PC, Sim City 2013, Assassin’s Creed Unity, or Diablo 3, but it far too much to dismiss as stuff that snuck through the cracks. It’s sticks out so painfully when you know how long this game has been in development. While I thankfully never experienced any hard crashes, there were audio errors (in particular, the last boss triggered a lightning bolt noise that kept replaying through the entire final cutscene), multiple lighting problems (weapons that used particle affects would sometimes cause flickering in areas with torchlight, the flying sword would sometimes create red streaks that extended the entire length of the screen), enemy models vibrate aggressively if you kill them while they are inside the level geometry, loot drops that occur inside level geometry or on slopes couldn’t be picked up, several lag and loading issues when using fast travel, one boss in particular causes extreme lag when he spawned too many projectiles. I also can’t not mention the numerous glitches and technical problems with this game. Everything in this game feels like such a controlled advance from SotN it’s one step forward, but meanwhile metroidvania’s as a genre have been making bold advances in every direction.
You never need fire to melt ice, you never need water to put out a fire, you never need a hammer to break a wall, etc. In the first level you use a fire shard to trigger a cannon, to my knowledge no other shard is ever used in this way. There is a shard that let’s you teleport short distances to squeeze through gaps, later on in the game you get another mobility shard that performs 50% of the same function but better. There’s a shard that let’s you pick up heavy objects and carry them around, it can’t grab enemies, the object can’t be dropped on enemies to damage them, there is no puzzle involving stacking multiple objects, and half the movable objects in the game are on rails. I get that they didn’t want you to be constantly futzing with your shard loadout, but so many of these mechanics feel barely explored. The “use your magic to activate doors” mechanic feels forgotten after the first quarter of the game, ditto for most of the boss shards required to enter new areas. But for all of these innovations, they feel incomplete or imperfect. The ability to aim spells is cool, some of the shards take advantage tech tricks you could never accomplish in a 2D game, manipulating objects in a 3D space is possible, and the Twin Dragon Towers use the 2.5D for a really cool effect. But the number of things that are evolutions or utilize the advance in tech is much lower. In this environment, you actually do have to ask yourself, what does Bloodstained improve upon and give me that SotN doesn’t? Because if I want to experience SotN, I can just play SotN.īloodstained has a lot of quality of life improvements consumables are instantly used, food has a purpose, quests give you diversion from the main story and encourage returning to town, hotswappable loadouts are a godsend, etc. SotN has been ported to modern hardware and can be bought for a quarter of the asking price of Bloodstained. SotN has a mythic place in gaming history, but it’s also not a lost artifact. But it’s hard to do that for Bloodstained when it is clearly trying to be Symphony of the Night for the modern era. I believe on the whole, that a game (or any media really) should be judged on its own merits and not in comparison to other games.
So I just finished Bloostained: Ritual of the Night, I have many feelings about this game.It was good, but it was also bad.
0 kommentar(er)
