Castlevania: SotN 4+

This Castlevania has a great, gothic beauty of a castle to explore, with solid gameplay & even a bit of story. Alucard, the son of Dracula is always a cool guy to play. I love this game.

The port is done fairly well, & that’s mostly what I’ll be talking about. I’m using an iphone7 btw.

The Slowdown Glitch
Once and a while, when loading a new area, the game just starts running slower than normal. I’ve tried restarting the app, clearing the apps on my phone, saving & loading ingame, & loading new areas, but nothing reliably solves this. I don’t know if it’s a widespread issue for other players.

The Autosave
It saves at every room/area you enter. This should mean that you could put the game down & not sweat losing all your progress, but sometimes if you leave it too long, it loses this autosave. So, really it feels like an autosave to make the game easier because you respawn right at the room entry, & this is already a very easy game when it comes to Castlevanias. You’ll also find that it saves for you just before you use an actual save point, so when you load the first thing you have to do is save it again to refill your hp.

The Buttons
Because you’ve got a button for each hand (sword & shield, dagger & shuriken, etc) & a big one for jump, & then a little one for a kind of dodge move, that doesn’t leave a ton of room. I’m guessing that’s why the attack buttons are so small. I had just finished playing Castlevania 2 emulated on a tablet, & I could resize my buttons & change the layout style, so having to get used to this was tricky. I’ve sunken several hours in & I still find myself miss pressing it. Oh, & I barely used the dodge when I had a controller, so having a hard to hit version of it is even less useful.

The Spells
The game has spells you can do by performing special move style button combos. Thankfully, they added a feature where now once you’ve done a spell, you can select it & recast it at the touch of a button. I love this, because it feels like you really have a variety of tactics at your disposal. In the ps1 version I thought the spells were neat, but could never really bother with them when I had swords to swing & a whole plethora of throwable weapons (see more below). However, spells that were especially tricky to pull off reliably before, Soul Steal, & the 4 Spirits one, are now at the touch of a button for me. These spells are so powerful, it breaks the game. If these two spells costed more mp that could solve this.

The Inventory
I remember the prev versions having pretty clunky inventory management. So now when I get a pile of one-use items, like healing food or throwable weapons, I’m not surprised to find that the process of equipping, using, equipping something else, is cumbersome. I think it’s a little better than before though, maybe because touch screen is faster to choose. One thing that’d make this better, is to have the inventory filters a set of buttons on that are constantly displayed while viewing inventory so you could just flip them off & on without a separate page. That & if the inventory also remembered your filter settings.
The menu at the librarians shop is also confusing. Every other menu scrolls up & down by pressing buttons, but his scrolls by sliding to the edge of the menu & scrolling it, which is a little clunky, & I could easily picture a new player never discovering that & simply assuming that the librarian just sold a handful of cheap items & that’s it.

To make the game harder I just never wear armor, except for when I’m flipping those gears in the clock tower puzzle, then it’s mirror armor all the way 😬

Great game everyone needs to own. But man the buttons are far to small and not sensitive enough. You tap them and they only work when they want to. Off by even a hair and it does not work. So you get hit by everything. You have to be so precisely on the mark to make them work. Fix this and easy 5/5 game.

Left side statue is stuck, can't progress in the story without reach the left side statue