Castlevania: Lords of Shadow – Mirror of Fate HD

To be honest, I really prefer Castlevania like this. 2D, exploring the castle, finding stuff and going back to places after getting new abilities. This is way more fun for me than Lords of Shadow 1. The gameplay is pretty simple, but I had a really good time with it. It's way more simple than Symphony of the Night, but it's still fun. Actually, playing this made me wish SOTN got a remaster like this, but with all the content from the original game. I haven't even finished SOTN yet, but it's pretty obvious that it's a much better and deeper game than Mirror of Fate. But I'm not really playing these games just to compare them. I'm playing them because I want to have fun, and Mirror of Fate surprised me a lot. I really liked exploring the castle. Even going for 100% doesn't feel like a boring chore here. I actually wanted to explore and find everything. That's probably one of my favorite things about this kind of Castlevania game. The biggest problem for me is that it's too short. I finished it in around 8 hours and honestly, I wanted more. But I understand that this was originally a 3DS game, so it makes sense. I can imagine this being really fun to play on the 3DS. The story was also pretty interesting. We get Simon, Trevor and Alucard, and I really liked seeing how everything connects to the Lords of Shadow story. There are also a bunch of references and Easter eggs from the older Castlevania games, especially SOTN, which was really cool. The story isn't anything crazy and it's pretty short, but it was enough to keep me interested until the end. And thankfully, I didn't have any big performance problems. Everything ran really well for me. This game is far from perfect, but I had a lot more fun with it than I expected. After Lords of Shadow 1, I wasn't expecting Mirror of Fate to be this enjoyable. Maybe I'll come back one day and try to get 100%. For once, I actually feel like doing it instead of feeling like the game is forcing me to. ★★★★☆ 4/5