Arwinia

If you are here for the classic Castlevania, the mechanics, controls, and difficulty will feel comfortable. Heart pickups replenish health and gold pickups can be used to buy items at the end of levels. Some items can only be found in hidden areas. Play is linear and some items are essential to progress. If you find you missed something important you can rewind your game to a previous checkpoint from the progress menu. You collect XP to level up which increases your max HP and fully replenishes your health. Which can be a life saver if timed right. When you die the game rewinds to the previous checkpoint and when you run out of lives you can continue from the checkpoint before that. You never have to go back and fight a boss again on continue. Continues are unlimited but you start with only 5 lives, which makes the later levels difficult but fair. This is a pattern based game. The first time through any area or boss fight will be the hardest. It is normal to die several times trying different strategies before finding one that will work. Some areas have instant death platform falls. Combined with knockback they can be challenging if you are new to this type of game play. Crouching will lessen knockback if you are trying to hold a position. If you want a more casual experience you can unlock an easier mode where you start with extra HP, 30 lives, and minimized knockback. Weapon bonuses are only noticeable with boss fights at first, but become critical later in the game as they can be the difference between having to hit each enemy several more times. Armor bonuses while hard to find or expensive offer a significant advantage as they minimize hit damage by the bonus amount. That said if you need a bunch of different weapons or multiple playable characters to be happy this game is probably not for you. The controls are easy to learn but hard to master. One thing that may not be apparent at first is you can enter open doors by pressing up. If you don’t like the default keyboard or controller mappings you can change them in settings. Jump attack becomes pretty important so triggering it with separate fingers on the controller helps. Jump direction and distance can be changed mid-air like most platformers. While you can walk up and down stairs, in most cases it is faster to just jump on and off of them. You get a satisfying pop sound when destroying enemies. Each major area has different music. I’ve got one of them stuck in my head. If you are not a fan of the chiptune music there are separate volume controls for the music and sound effects. The setting is solid D&D fantasy, you won’t find any out of place guns or robots in this game. A satisfying game to beat.

Not a bad game. An unpolished one. Very much the difference between bad developers and inexperienced developers. This game barely reaches "decent". It's...fun. In very much the same way Castlevania is. It's difficult and requires some patience but that was the shtick of Castlevania. The more I play Arwinia the more I realize that the difficult is due to poor polish and if they spend some time tightening things up, it'll be a good game.

It's a fun Castlevania-like. I'm still early in but the controls feel good (after remapping to my taste) and the game has some challenge to it. I would recommend it.

I don't know if this review is helpful because I am comparing this against 1980's games from the 8-Bit era. Arwinia is an straight linear action platformer for this who have played Ghouls n' Ghost. The level designs are straight out of Ghouls n' Ghost than Castlevania, but this time you have a health bar instead of the two hits and your dead. Many sidescroller action RPGs tend to have a Metroidvania like Castlevania 2 Simon Quest or Casltevania as many sidescroller RPG's are. The level designs are straight out of Ghouls n' Ghost, but this time you have a health bar instead of the two hits and your dead. Arwinia like some games from that era they allowed you to collect money "gold" that can purchase stuff I guess to make you stronger in later levels. Its just a basic 8-Bit Platfomer at most than a adventure game.

Being a Castlevania fan i had my eye on this game for awhile. This seemed like it would be a fun game however, i couldn't get past the 2nd part of the first stage. I know Castlevania is a difficult series but, having to hit zombies twice even at level 4 seems like a little much. The platforming on the 2nd part of the first level is pretty hardcore. The game is way to difficult to start out and doesn't ease you into the play style. Sadly after playing for half an hour, I lost interest in the game.