Game Reviews

The first thing you should understand about the new Castlevania is that it's possibly not the Castlevania you were expecting. While Konami's latest offers plenty of Gothic crenulations and whip-centric combat as yet another Belmont faces off against a wave of Halloween nasties, it sidesteps, to a large extent, the architectural complexity and wily level design that has helped define the series.

You'll still be unlocking new skills to open what amounts to a variety of different doors, engaging in a little light puzzling, and picking your way through environments that grow gradually more elaborate as you head deeper into the adventure. But MercurySteam, the series' current custodian, has shifted the emphasis away from the detailed non-linear exploration of a single location in order to embrace an action adventure with a broader, but more straightforward, approach. The second thing you should understand, however, is that this isn't necessarily as bad as you might fear. Stripping away much of the intricacy – the levels folded in on themselves, the poring over the mini-map as you hunt for promising gaps – sounds like heresy, but it feels, more often than not, like smart pragmatism. This is a series that has always struggled whenever it has headed away from a 2D plane, and while you can curse the developers for lacking the ambition to truly get the old formula to work in three dimensions, you can't really fault the adventure they've offered up instead. As reboots go, this is smart, pretty, and generous. Fans will understandably be miffed at the absence of things like the classic soundtrack and the old plotlines – Lords of Shadows is determined to start its own story from scratch, with Gabriel on a quest to bring his dead wife back to life – but there are plenty of things to help distract them from their misery.