REVIEW: Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow

Genre: Action-RPG-Jump'n'Run

Release: 2005

Platform: NDS

Graphics: Cool 2D. Nothing overwhelming, although the anime-intro-sequences are extremely cool. It's pretty solid, not the pinnacle of 2D-NDS-graphics, but still it's fun to watch.

Story: Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow begins where Aria of Sorrow ends. Once again you assume the role of Soma Cruz, exchange student and slayer of Dracula, who somehow inherited the dark power of that batguy.

Now in this game a cult has formed which tries to create a new Dark Lord by killing Soma and using his power. Something like that. The gameplay is as good as usual. Once again you have the ability to consume the souls of enemies, leading to a variety of attacks and spells, again you buy items and so on and so forth. There are only two more or less big changes, one being the ability to obtain new items via transforming them using the obtained souls, the other one being magic seals which you need to draw on the touchscreen in order to permanently defeat bosses. Both changes sound cool on paper, but are rarely used ingame. Of course, they are used, but in my opinion they could have introduced more weapons which can be upgraded. But maybe it's just a case of bad memory and there are indeed many changeable weapons. Same deal with these seals: they are only used on bosses, but are also increasing in their difficulty to draw, which means once you figured out how to draw one seal properly (usually after the second try, but again, I may be wrong) it will never be used again. Nevertheless, cool features.

Awesome Fact:  Like in the previous game you are allowed to replay the game, keeping your souls and items. Or you can play again the so called JULIUS MODE, this time with a little change: instead of just controlling Julius Belmont, you get to play Joko Belnaded, a which, and Alucard. All these three differ regarding abilities, strength, defense, and so on, but that's no problem since you can swap between them on the go, which is often required to clear certain bosses. Much fun was had.

RATING: 8/10