Vampire: Master of Darkness

"For those of us dreaming of a Game Gear Castlevania, Master of Darkness is a rude awakening."

I'm hardly alone in holding the 2D Castlevania series in very high regard; with most of the games being an utter joy both to play and to look at, it's truly a platformer player's heaven. Over the years, Castlevania found a home on many systems, but not on the Game Gear, unfortunately. This mustn't have gone unnoticed by Sims, Sega's in house development studio, which is where Master of Darkness steps in...or rather would've done so if it wasn't a total failure. I guess no Castlevania fan is overly taken aback by the fact that it can't match our beloved franchise - nothing has so far, after all - but nothing can really prepare one for what is an interactive abomination that frustrates the player from the beginning to the (likely premature) end.

The path to disenchantment is uncharacteristically long with Master of Darkness, as it makes a brilliant first impression. The intro is tasteful, the music is above average for a Game Gear title and the in-game graphics are very good indeed, with exceedingly large sprites, a suitably sombre colour palette and detailed backgrounds with lots of animation. But even at this stage, i.e. in the first few minutes of the game, its first problem becomes apparent: the game is too uniformly dark. The Game Gear display is capable of more than adequate contrast if properly programmed for, but in Master of Darkness, the characters practically blend with the backgrounds on several stages. Admittedly, that's nice to look at, but prioritising visuals to the point where the player is at risk of spotting the enemy too late or not at all is a mark of poor design.

Another graphics-related issue that ends up negatively affecting gameplay is animation. There are actually several different problems but they end up complementing one another all too well. Firstly, your character, dr. Ferdinand Social, is animated stiffly enough (and named appropriately enough) for him to win a grant at the Ministry of Silly Walks, which, on the other hand, doesn't make him a very good videogame protagonist as he is way too slow in reacting to the player's inputs. In spite of this, the programmers chose to be unnaturally thorough and animated every possible movement that he'd make in real life, such as the backswing of the stake, arguably the only useful of the game's four primary weapons, thus further increasing the delay between the command and its execution.

Primary weapons with a plural? That's right, Master of Darkness features a truly disastrous system of multiple primary weapons differing both in strength and in range. This may sound like a refreshing change from Castlevania's boring old whip - and I bet that's exactly what the designers at Sims thought, too - but in fact it's seriously detrimental to the gameplay. The varying ranges of the dagger (weak/short), the sabre (weak/long), the stake (strong/long) and the axe (strong/short) - all melee weapons with invariably minuscule hit areas - mean that you can't ever get used to any sort of consistency of timing for the attacks, nor can you ever get used to how many hits an enemy will take before he's disposed of. In short, with the way the weapons system is set up, even significantly more athletic characters than the lethargic dr. Social would be put at a serious disadvantage. Furthermore, you don't get to select a primary weapon freely - otherwise everybody would just be using the stake all the time. Instead, they are found in item masks (think candles) and upon discovery, you can choose to pick them up or not. That's the theory, anyway, as the masks are often placed so as to force you to take whatever's in them, i.e. secondary weapons, health power-ups, point bonuses, and extra lives, and the aforementioned primary weapons with a 25% desirability ratio.

You've seen the final score, so you can imagine that I'm about as fond of the level design as I am of the weapon system - and rightfully so. Master of Darkness embodies the worst of both worlds, as it's one of those games where you mostly walk to the right a lot but every time you do have to fight and enemy or jump onto another platform, there's some sort of a nasty surprise waiting for you. Even the most basic platform jumping becomes a chore in Master of Darkness as the enemies tend to be positioned just outside the viewing area in order to maximise on cheap hit and instant death opportunities. In addition to that, most enemies are fast, they appear out of nowhere and you can never tell whether they will respawn or not (unlike the items, which never do), while the airborne ones all have several patterns, which makes dodging them an even less desirable alternative to disposing of them (see previous paragraph). Knock-back is not too severe but it's accompanied by paralysis, which means that you're often unable to attack an enemy when he's closest, which often results in yet another it. Once you realise all this, you have no option but to stop every couple of steps to wait and see whether something might come charging without warning from either side or from above, which, naturally, brings the pace of the game practically to a standstill.

Judging from screenshots and mostly very favourable reviews, I had high hopes for Master of Darkness and I was all the more disappointed as a result. Technically and visually, the game is beyond reproach, but its great potential is completely ruined by incomprehensible decisions regarding the gameplay and level design. It's as if the designers thought Castlevania too smooth and too fair, and decided to make things right with a nasty, tedious game that would have the players cry for the occasional horizontally flying bat. Well, they certainly succeeded - though I can't imagine what satisfaction was to be had on account of that.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 01/22/07