Review: Castlevania: Judgement (Wii)

Still, Konami somehow managed to pick out 14 characters to make up the numbers for this little slice of fanservice. Now the idea of a Castlevania beat-‘em-up was understandably met with much cynicism, but let’s take an honest look.

There’s no point in going into great detail with the plot, because it’s really nothing more than an excuse to get the characters together for a punch-up. There’s a Story mode that changes slightly with each character, but all the stories eventually boil down to the same thing and all of it is nonsensical. It’s hard to go through the same mode no less than 27 times to complete it fully though, because the dialogue is just embarrassing (Maria’s story inparticular is utterly cringeworthy).

The faults with this game are much more fundamental than mere bad dialogue. First off, the controls are somewhat hit-and-miss. The Wii remote’s waggle is fairly responsive, but only because so few commands are assigned to it so it’s hard for it to get confused. You can also choose to use the Classic and Gamecube controllers, but for some reason the traditional controls feel unnecessarily complicated, which is really odd for a game with such a simple fighting engine. It does get easier to manage with some practice, but it’s initially rather off-putting.

An interesting idea is that the characters can move freely around the arenas, and pick up items to help them out. This reminded us of Capcom’s excellent Power Stone series, but unlike Power Stone the camera is absolutely dreadful. The characters frequently block the view, it snaps about apparently at random and makes it incredibly difficult to judge the distance between the characters. It’s the worst camera that we’ve ever come across in a game like this. The arenas are also far too large, meaning you spend half the fight chasing the opponent around.

Rounding off the really game-crippling flaws is the fact that no attempts have been made to balance the characters whatsoever. The famous ones like the Belmonts, Dracula and Maria are ridiculously over-powered, while the lesser-known characters like Golem and Cornell are pathetically weak. If there’s a match between an over-powered and under-powered character, the player with the under-powered character is going to have a thoroughly miserable time.

At least the game gives you plenty to do. As well as the Story mode you have your standard Arcade, Versus and Survival matches, as well as a Castle mode that sees you battling through various stages with set conditions and handicaps, rather like the Mission Battle mode in the Soul Calibur series. There’s even an option for online gameplay, but finding other players is very hard as is usually the case with Nintendo’s online service.

One thing we’re thankful for is that the music is up to the usual excellent Castlevania standard, and on a technical level the graphics are very impressive for the Wii, with some gorgeous arenas and detailed character models. However, the character design is the absolute worst we have ever seen in this series. We suspect that Takeshi Obata, the character designer, thought he was working on a Death Note game because the characters look absolutely nothing like what we’ve come to expect. Simon and Trevor Belmont look like they’ve just left a bondage club, Death and Cornell look like robots, and everyone else just looks completely stupid. We never thought we’d miss the cartoon stylings of the first two DS games, but we’d take that any day over this generic manga foulness. In this respect, the game doesn’t even work as fanservice since the characters are unrecognisable.

The most curious thing about this game is that, with some practice and an agreement to play by gentleman’s rules (e.g. no Golem versus Dracula), this game does actually become quite fun. It tries to make the most of a stupid idea, and compared to previous efforts at a 3D Castlevania game it’s quite a triumph. However, with everything taken into account, it’s impossible to recommend this to anyone other than series die-hards, and even they should pick up Order of Ecclesia instead.

Rating: 4 / 10

Words by Drew Middlemas