Castlevania - Dunkelschwamm

  

    What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets. But enough talk… Have at you! Explore Dracula's castle, which in this case means a smattering of respawning enemies and long walks through them.

SCMapDB page

Author: Gadabout

Date of release: 2016

Maps in package: 1

Map review of Castlevania

(originally posted on SCMapDB)

by dunkelschwamm | July 2, 2023 | 4169 characters

    Castlevania is a non-linear walkthrough action map for Sven Co-op which aims to recreate the feeling of a Castlevania game. The map is divided up into 6 sections: The introduction area, the hub, the underground, the chapel, the clock tower, and Dracula's arena. Aside from the hub and final arena, each section comprises of a collection of challenges and a boss.

    These challenges take two primary flavors: platforming puzzles, and combat. Platforming puzzles in this map range from fair to tedious. Much of it revolves around barnacle grappling, which also means if one player reaches the end of a particularly challenging platforming segment another player can grapple to them. The most egregious platforming section comes from the clock tower, which requires players make lots of timed precision jumps with constantly respawning stukabats.

    Let's talk about the combat. There's lots of constantly respawning enemies, which isn't uncommon in Castlevania, but the enemies respawning are a different matter in Sven Co-op. There are some zombies, headcrabs, and stuka bats which I could see the argument for respawning (though the stuka bats in particular turn out to be annoying as shit). However, the main hub is plagued by respawning Barnabi. Their precision shooting, paired with numbers and other respawning enemies, paired with the fact that they always come back, makes traversing the hub a nightmare. What's worse, the most reliable MP5 spawn in the map is surrounded by 4 respawning Barnabi!

    The weapons are odd here. There's the crowbar, barnacle, pistol, and MP5. The monsters are largely balanced around this, and the MP5 ends up being a powerhouse. Early on ammo can be discovered inside candles and such, much like in old Castlevania games. However, after a bit light sources stop dropping ammo or weapons or whatever. Booooo! Most reliably, we got our ammo from a box of ammo being guarded by two Barnabi in the hub area.

    With limited ammo and respawning killer enemies, this does become quite a death cycle map. Die, respawn, grab what little ammo you can, hope to get an MP5 from those Barnabi, and rush the next area. Thankfully, when you get to the end of each area you get a shortcut teleporter. First a teleporter takes players from spawn past the intro into the hub. Then, from there, a new teleport will show up within the hub to before the boss of each subsequent area, all the way to Dracula. This unfortunately skips the MP5, so we'd often trek ahead for that and return for the MP5, then return back to the teleporters.

    I'm not gonna lie, the combat is largely a grind. There's times where it really shines, but the Barnabi and the Death boss fight in particular were just insanely draining.

    Where the map really shines is in capturing the funny nonsense that makes Castlevania what it is: spiral staircases, annoying clocktowers, zombies, and Dracula with a funny second phase. I think it may have played poorly for me because it needed more than two people- four seems like it'd be just right.

    Anyway, give this map a go. There's lots of environment variety, it evokes Castlevania with design philosophy and music, and creates a fun non-linear map. Once you beat all the sections from the hub before Dracula, the Dracula area opens and you have to fight a bodyguard who turns into a Tor. It's pretty wacky, and not all that crazy fun to play, but it's memorable and I think you'll have fun witnessing it.

Pros:

• Great Castlevania-y Environments and Music
• The chapel staircase was really well done
• Gibbing enemies with the MP5 is fun
• Lots of creative bosses
• Great progress flow with the 3 areas before Dracula

Cons:

• Bad respawn reclaim flow with lots of respawning monsters
• Some bosses are annoying to fight
• Some platforming is really annoying (clocktower)
• The clocktower teleport is right after it gives you a second MP5. Why do that????
• After a while the cool item-dropping torches just kinda stopped

Score: 7.6 / 10