E3 Hands-On: Castlevania: Harmony of Despair - Preview
by VGChartz Staff , posted on 20 June 2010 / 4,969 Views
While Lords of Shadow is busy trying to bring Castlevania to a new 3D action game crowd, Koji Igarashi (the originator!) is trying to give us a new way to play the old 2D Metroidvania games by introducing simultaneous six-player online co-op (four offline). That sounds super.
This game is conceptualized as more of a fun side adventure; it's non-canon and won't have a lot of storyline. You can pick from one of five 2D Metroidvania heroes: Alucard (Symphony of the Night), Jonathan Morris and Charlotte Aulin (Portrait of Ruin), Soma Cruz (Aria of Sorrow), and Shanoa (Order of Ecclesia). If everyone wants to be Alucard, don't worry: there's a variety of color schemes for each as well. Also neat, it reuses the hero sprites and special moves from their respective games.
Now, you may worry that this re-using of old game assets will make this a waltz down retro lane not worth taking. That's far from the truth, however; this game will do everything in its power to earn your 1200 Microsoft points this summer (yeah, another $15 XBLA game... I'll try to show you it's worth it).
The first cool thing is the castle. To avoid trying to smash all six players on one tiny screen, you have the whole castle as your battleground... and you can check it out all at once. A simple click of the right analog stick zooms in to normal Castlevania distance, or out to roughly twice as far away, giving you less detail but more world visible, or you can zoom allllll the way out to see the whole thing at once. I tried playing like this; it didn't work that well. However, it's a great way to check on your allies's statuses in relation to you.
Here're the basics. Each castle is its own level. There's a boss in one corner of the castle, and you start in the other corner. You have a ten-minute time limit to defeat him, and there is no way you'll have enough time to get 200.6% of the castle explored before your time is up. There are mirrors that you can use to teleport you or your allies closer to each other. The more players there are, the harder the enemies will be. You know, for balance. It wouldn't be much fun if you could six-on-one those giant bosses, would it? Well, this ensures that you HAVE to.
There are a lot of objectives that can only be completed by working together. It has a slight air of LittleBigPlanet, where the one hero would stand on a switch to open a door for another player, who could then let the first hero join him on the other side. They're not all as simple as that, but HoD definitely goes out of its way to make sure that the players aren't all running around mimbly-bimbly with no cohesion.
There aren't any experience levels anymore - only gold. You can't even change equipment now, so make sure you pick up the right armors (and before your greedy teammates, too!). It gives an immediacy to the action, and that time limit floating at the top of the screen also helps. Oh, and the end boss fires a giant laser at you every once in a while, too. Enjoy!
Castlevania: Harmony of Despair (HD, get it?) will be out in just a few weeks as part of Microsoft's Summer of Arcade lineup, along with other games like indie darling Limbo and the Hydro Thunder update. If Lords of Shadow wasn't your style, maybe this "retro evolved" throwback will be a little more up your alley?
