Citadale - The Ancestral Strain

First off, this is not a metroidvania. It is a level based platformer that has some exploration aspects in some of the levels. Of the 4 levels I played 2 were linear, and 2 had some exploration. That is not a bad thing, I actually prefer linear platformers to metroidvanias, but if you buy this thinking it is a metroidvania you will be disappointed. This game is very heavily inspired by castlevania, just looking at the trailer you can clearly see the influence of that game here. Many enemies are similar and the sub weapons are all identical to those you would find in various castlevania games. In this game you can hold 2 sub weapons at once, which is neat, and you also have a block button which is fairly useless 90% of the time. The game plays pretty well and I initially was having fun with it. The controls are responsive, the graphics are nice, the music is really good and could fit right into a real castlevania game. So why is this not recommended? This game falls into hard for the wrong reasons and that is why I ultimately put it down. You only have 1 life, and while you do have unlimited continues, continuing puts you back at the beginning of the level. The levels themselves are fairly long, which is a good thing, but one mis step and you are sent back to the start of the level. This gets frustrating very fast as the levels progress in difficulty you are given absolutely no room for error, mess up once and back to the beginning you go, only to have to replay the entire level from scratch. What makes matters worse is there are an abundance of platforms that flip when you step on them. If you played any castlevania game you know exactly what I'm talking about. You jump on the platform and you have to quickly jump off them or the platform rotates and you fall down. The thing is that the timing for these platforms is way too precise. You have to jump the second you hit the platform or you fall, there is absolutely no margin for error, if you are off by a fraction of a second you fall, die, and have to replay an entire level from the start. When you die on a boss you continue right from them, which is definitely a good thing, but making your way through the harder levels is just more frustrating then fun. A life system or more frequent checkpoints would alleviate this problem, as it stands now the game is just too frustrating to play.

Challenging difficulty is fine. Although you have unlimited continues, when you give the player just 1 life to do a whole level then kicking them back to the very beginning of the stage when you die doesn't entice me to play much further. Made it to level 4 and the difficulty spike is insane. The flip boards you stand on have some very precise timing required otherwise you fall through to your death or repeating a small section you just did. Over and over.

Un jeu qui se veut un clone de Castlevania. Je m'adresse au developpeur. Les seuls points positifs sont les graphismes 16 bits et les musiques. Le reste c'est aux chiottes. A partir du 4eme stage,c'est du n'importe quoi? Il faut sauter sur des plates formes qui se retournent aussi sec et tout le long du stage : une horreur. Et si on creve c'est debut pas de check point. Dans Castlevania il y a ce genre de plates formes mais pas autant qu'ici. Après non mais c'est quoi de ces boss meme pas inspirés.Les boss 1,3 et 5 sont les memes. Le 5eme pour le battre,expliquez moi comment eviter toutes les flammes car c'est impossible. Et le boss retire beaucoup trop de points de vie si on le touche Et le bouclier ne pare pas les attaques quand on est baissé. Le boss final est beaucoup plus facile. Le pire c'est que je vais devoir y rejouer pour trouver les fameux stages annexes. Bordel Ezekiel gommez tous ces defauts. Franchement meme trilogy est beaucoup mieux. Je vous deconseille ce jeu je suis très déçu

實在是不好玩 地圖空洞 敵人無趣 整體來說就是 未完成的遊戲 千萬不要買 不然你也只是浪費時間退費而已 1/100 it's boring. the map is huge but lack of contents enemies are repetitive overall, it isn't complete as a game. there's even a "paper spider" boss which means it doesn't have the "get hit animation" it's more like a person who is lacking of enthusiasm to game and want to force out something weird. therefore, don't buy this game or you will waste more time refunding it 1 out of 100

Unfortunately, I can't recommend Citadale in good conscience. Though it has some redeeming qualities - the pixel art is crisp and the music is thematically appropriate - there's much here to take issue with. Level design is comprised largely of long, empty hallways packed to the gills with dead ends, forcing the player to backtrack numerous times in order to ascertain the correct path for progression. Enemies are by-the-books in design and behavioral patterns, and bosses fair even worse: the first boss in particular is compromised of entirely randomized movement patterns and doesn't telegraph his attacks at all - they're clearly proximity- and radius-based. Progression is gated off by doors that require a toll in the form of coins, a-la Mario 64's star doors, but strangely, these coins can be farmed from random enemies; they also seem to respawn behind torches and lanterns across each level, making them trivial (and random) to obtain. Top all this off with a number of bugs - spamming the slide move layers its sound effect atop itself, exiting the options menu closes the game entirely - and you can see there's a lot of room for improvement. There's a good game underneath it all, but the lack of refinement and polish overpowers all, sadly. Find more reviews and recommendations on my Steam Curator page, Indie Infinitesimal: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/41769714/

Well, for starters i prefer the previous trilogy. The new subweapons are pretty much useless and i miss the old text dialogs from the prequels. There are some wonky design choices in this one like the illusion castle level design or the flipping platforms but even with this is playable and fun. The difficulty i would said is medium as 8bits games go, not as hard as the description says, there are checkpoints at boss battles and after completing a level. Multiple paths with different bosses and levels allow for further replayability this time and a alternative ending, the secret stages are actually better than the main ones. The music is catchy. Simply dont forget that is an indie and you will enjoy it, there are not that many Castlevania look alikes in Steam...

Это не игра, а какой то сырой билд. Уныло.

Se siete amanti dei vecchi Castlevania, vi consiglio l'acquisto. A differenza del suo predecessore, è meno lineare, nel senso che i livelli hanno diverse direzioni da prendere con diversi boss di fine livello, inoltre a seconda della strada che sceglierete, vi verrà sbloccato un diverso livello successivo. Troverete alcuni livelli che sono un omaggio vero e proprio a Super Castlevania IV. Voto finale 7 su 10

The CONTROLLER ISSUES of the previous games are still present here, so use a keyboard to play it. The musics are good, and the graphics are ok, (but there is no cutscenes in-game). Some stages has different paths - that enriches the exploration a bit (unfortunately they only works as alternate ways to reach same place...) If you looking for a "easy" castlevania-like, try this on.

This game has its own rules and does test your resilience. For easier time, cheese the hell out of re-harvestable hearts, coins and pork chops by simply re-entering the screen (you can go back and re-visit screens - that is the 'metroidvania' part of the game) and the HEAL "sub-weapon." If you try to play it like the traditional CV games, you will have a needlessly bad time with it. You can have TWO sub-weapons (you can switch by pressing SPACE). Sure, there is the manual, though that is for nerds. The game is about 3.0 hours long first time through. It have five (5) stages. The fourth level, man, and those flipping platforms over bottomless pits. Unless you press jump in a specific way as soon as (or soon afterwards - it is unnecessarily cryptic and random at tunes), your jump will get ignored and you will fall. To improve the game, I would increase the duration the flipping platforms allow you to jump on them. That is because if the game lags even a little, the jump inputs in that 0.1 to 0.2 second window will get dropped and there is nothing you can do about it at that point. Make it closer to 0.5 seconds to match the overall stiffness of the game controls. Otherwise it will be the main thing in the game to one-sidedly screw the players over and lower its grade as an enjoyable game. To make the game not lag up your system with the enemy quantity and that unnecessary background animation, you can use the following launch / command line parameters in its Steam properties (use the Windowed mode for the resolution to actually take effect): -screen-width 640 -screen-height 360 -force-d3d9 -screen-quality Fastest You can change the 'd9' (DirectX 9) part to something like 'd11' or 'd12' if you have a newer GPU made for it. It is a generic Unity optimization thing. If you want the resolution to stick, you need to select the Windowed Mode in the options for it. Otherwise it will fullscreen the game. Note that the game lacks all the basic resolution settings and quality sliders even the tiniest games tend to have. The levels tend to be 20 to 30 min long. If you die before the boss, you have to do it all over again. Yes, this game has instant death obstacles. Yes, that is a boneheaded design. The intro scene claims the game has an autosave feature, though that is rather pointless when you have just ONE LIFE. In contrast, even the first Castlevania game had FOUR LIVES and occasional check point saves. Observations: -A sword attack that has a range / hit box comparable to a toothpick (this makes boss fights super difficult). -A shield that occasionally blocks projectiles (not always - do not count on it) -No double-jump -Platforming puzzles (e.g. you cannot confront the bomber man without blowing up) -Boss battles that take half-damage and do triple damage + with endlessly spawning enemies and projectiles, making them last for a long time. -You have infinite retries at the boss once you reach it and it saves your stage progression upon beating the boss. -Sub-weapons do minimal damage to the boss and you cannot restock "hearts" as-in sub-weapon shots if you die at the boss. You can spawn hearts endlessly beforehand by re-entering stages and re-harvesting hearts. -The heart costs of sub-weapons tend to be massive, discouraging the heart-collecting and the sub-weapon use because they are not going to last. In practice, most drops give you just ONE heart while a weapon use can consume 5.0 to 20 hearts. That means you are likely to spend all of your sub-weapon uses on the boss in seconds (while the boss barely takes damage from it), no matter how much you hoard hearts. Overall, the game feels like an endurance test both in and outside the boss battles. It is one big obstacle course by its game design style and encourages extremely tedious and focused play styles. In other words, you will perish if you try to relax with this one. The ending is one PNG for about 30 seconds and then it is back to the main menu with you (or the options one if you got in there - this game, man). I guess the music is aight.