Wallachia: Reign of Dracula

Fun retro style "castlevania but with a bow" game. For a retro game its rather on the easy side, but this might be because I recently played all Castlevania games and these are much harder. Game is fun and it rewards good play, the better you do the more power ups you can keep to make the bosses more easy. Music is great and I love the high res pixel art. When mastered the game is rather short, it took me 2 hours to beat on normal and it took me 1,2 hours to beat it again on hard. If you're really good at the game you can beat it in about 30 minutes(without dying). Overal to me its a hidden gem. It plays great, looks and sounds great and learning the stages and boss paterns was a lot of fun. I got it on sale for less then 2,- and even at full price its worth it if you're into the genre. It has a bug where you cant spam arrows sometimes, but I had no issues beating the game twice in a row and can 1cc it.

What a beauty. Solid difficulty and lovely artwork. What's not to like?

good

Recommended if you enjoy oldschool Arcade-style games, otherwise you'll probably find the difficulty very frustrating. It's a bit rough around the edges, but still fun to play.

Wallachia is a rare hidden gem if you ask me. It actually understands what made the classics so great and timeless. It's a true arcade-inspired action platformer. The game is fairly short and can be beaten in a single session but it's got some extra content and is designed for mastery which if you want to extend the play time a bit further is worth putting in the effort to 100% the game. I haven't finished Hard mode yet but I found Normal mode to be a fair challenge. It's got an old school lives system here so it is a bit punishing when you game over and are sent back to the beginning of a stage, but the stages are fairly short so it didn't really bother me until Stage 7 which has it's checkpoints pushed towards the end of the stage, but I mastered that whole stage in about 15 minutes anyway. Beating it hitless lol. You also lose powerups if you get hit a single time, but keeping them makes you feel like a total bad @$$ and as you learn the stage layouts and enemy behaviors, you'll be completing stages almost hitless pretty quickly if you got moderate skill. The graphics and artstyle is incredible, really reminiscent of early 90's arcade hits. Rare to see for indie games. The sprites are huge, which is great for detail but it does lead to one of the two major frustration points of this game: Large hit boxes and very low invincibility frames after getting hit. This makes dodging quite a bit harder, and recovery difficult as you can easily find yourself losing your entire health bar from one mistake. It's especially rough on some of the bosses, they have massive hit boxes and often give you very little room to avoid them, especially on Hard mode. Those parts would've been nice to see smoothed out but if you are used to that era of arcade games and hardcore console games than these issues are easier to forgive. The game is a lot of fun most of the time though. The soundtrack is pretty great. It's got that CD-quality to it and fits the stages well. A good handful of them are quite memorable and catchy too. It's fitting for a game clearly inspired by Castlevania, though it's not quite at that caliber. Overall it's a great little game for a decent price. Get it on sale if it's a bit too steep at full price. The game will best be enjoyed by retro gaming fans and hardcore arcade fanatics. For casuals it'll be a bit frustrating unless you are actually willing to LEARN how to play games. There is an easy mode, but I didn't bother with it. Normal felt alright, I died a good chunk of times on some stages especially early on, but as i got familiar with the controls and the game's design habits, I quickly learned how to deal with the threats. It's more of a shooter than a platformer, so like any good shooter, you should ALWAYS BE SHOOTIN'. 8/10

[h1]A reminder of why old platformers sucked.[/h1] You play the whole level, get up to the boss, die, [b]start the whole level all over again[/b] and repeat until you get it right. Some people seem to like it but that's a hard no from me, Chief.

Really nice games, a semi-metroidvania