Castlevania - GrandmasterJ

 

    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 GrandmasterJ | July 2, 2023 | 3838 characters

    I was really excited to play this map, I am a big fan of other game franchises shoved into the old school mess that is goldsrc. I haven't played much Castlevania, but the moment we started my teammate ran over to a torch, destroyed it, and then whooped for joy when it dropped ammo so I'm assuming this map nails it.

    The map has two primary components, platforming and combat. Combat is against some low health enemies that respawn forever and quickly, mostly stuka bats and Barnabus, both very annoying. There is no armor anywhere so we die very quickly. Because the enemies spawn so frequently it is also very common to get hit in the back from the room we just cleared out. This also serves to complicate several platforming sections, one with stuka bats and rotating gears is especially annoying.

    The map looks really interesting and has some big architecture. The first little jaunt in the map is a path up to the castle and inside the castle are massive rooms. One particularly impressive room was a gigantic staircase that reminded me of the infinite staircase Bowser had in Mario 64. Monsters started popping out from behind pillars and my teammate mumbled something about this being exactly how it is in Castlevania.

    There are checkpoints in the map which I am a huge fan of, but they seem to be deliberately placed so as to be almost not worth even using them. Late in the map we unlock another mp5 and I thought this was going to turn into a checkpoint. But no, there was a checkpoint immediately after that, bypassing the mp5 completely in such a way that we couldn't go back for it. In fact, the first mp5 we get is in a central area to the map, but all the checkpoints are in a room a ways away. We have to fight six Barnabus and roughly six stuka bats with only pistols just to pick it up and walk back to the teleporters. It's madness, it taunts us, this map has five checkpoints and the first one is the only one that is any good. For most of the map we simply skipped past the second and third checkpoints in favor of walking that distance.

    At the very end we fight Dracula himself, a bodyguard with uzis. Players may have 100 health but that goes insanely fast in this map. I attempted to kamikaze Dracula by jumping down onto him, but he shot me and the impact of the bullets kept me aloft until I died without having hit him a single time. This map has a time limit of 70 minutes and I cheated just to make sure I was going to beat the map before time ran out. Dracula has a second form and its even worse.

    I really like this map but the combat drags it down and none of the checkpoints alleviate that issue. The platforming isn't too much hassle except in places covered in stuka bats. The combat isn't too much hassle but it is incessant and also serves to make respawning a total drag. There are many checkpoints but they all seem to suck in their own unique way and one of the later ones puts players just past the mp5. It's such a brain-dead approach to equipping players and setting up checkpoints, what is the point of that mp5? Neither my teammate or I ever picked it up, it was totally useless.

Pros:

• great looking map with amazing atmosphere
• ammo in the torches
• there are a lot of checkpoints
• enemies were plentiful but had low health and gibbed frequently
• really sold the Castlevania vibe

Cons:

• checkpoints always drop players past important supplies
• enemies respawn very frequently and make the respawn walk of shame very anoying
• sometimes enemies spawn so fast they attack us from behind
• dying is really easy and that makes the previous cons much worse to deal with

Score: 7 / 10