Citadale: The Legends Trilogy Reviews

It's a cool castlevania like game Liked the music

This game's inputs are so poorly written that if you quit and try to restart the controller basically won't work. These devs clearly don't know how to write basic DirectInput code. It's pretty sad. Wait for them to fix this before buying. Even basic indie games don't have this issue.

An meh Castlevania clone that takes a bit to much from it's source material to really stand out. It plays well ok so you might try it out if you're interested. One interesting thing I've noticed is that the music from chapter 1 stage 3 Broken Overpass comes from a midi I've heard on vgmusic.com. https://www.vgmusic.com/music/console/philips/cd-i/zcdiovr3.mid Here's a a youtube link with Citadale's version of the song https://youtu.be/5LeZA5MxEGY?t=1082 Okay it's slowed down and and only the second half of the song plays in Citadale but its still the same song. Have I just discovered plagiarism?

Tried to play this a few times. The game is quite slow or possibly lagging. In this bundle there are three games and I will refer to them as 1, 2 and 3 as I cannot remember the titles. The first game will not let me proceed for more than a few screens to the right. I fight a couple stronger opponents and an orb appears and the scenery on the right pulls out to reveal a ledge of sorts. I can not grab the floating orb or special move icon and I can not pass the wall above the ledge on the right, even after the smaller ledge revealed itself. I assume the orb is a Double Jump or Higher Jump move. When you force restart the level it starts you with what ever HP you had last time, so if half, you have half starting. And this time the screen will not scroll at all. Your character can go off the screen, but that is it. That and the character can get stuck in mid swing and only turn left and right. You can no longer move. The second game is much the same way. A screen or two over and there is a ledge too high to jump. However there is no orb that appears at all. I did not bother to restart it. The third game I got a few screens further, but it still lagged and I just thought it best to refund the game while I still had time. I asked the forum for help, but am not going to wait, so there you have it. I cannot recommend the game even on a decent sale. To me it was simply unplayable. A shame because it looked quite nice and I am a Castlevania fan. Hopefully you have a better time with it than I did, if you try it.

I really need to state this here, I found the game to be, meh. It was just ok. I didn't find it overall bad, but I probably won't revisit. The game itself starts off pretty interesting, when the game has this ambush point and a bunch of enemies come out of the woodwork. I didn't really encounter anything else like this later. The game kinda just becomes a chore to walk through the corridors to the bosses. Bosses come down to three things. They are too easy, have a pattern you discover then they are easy, which since the bosses tend to have just one, doesn't take too long, or the final, they have a randomish pattern with a ton of body damage attached. I don't like the eyeballs and if you read the story bits, the game knows they are the toughest part. Though I will say the first one was fun, due to the spike gimmick. Sub weapons come off as unnecessary for the most part, being useful in some situations, but don't accomplish much otherwise. My favorite two, reason why two will be said shortly, is the Blue Orb and the Shuriken. The Shuriken it very straight forward and actually does help, being useful pretty much everywhere. I'd consider it like the Cross. The Blue Orb is great as well, showing up in chapter 3, which shoots out waves and works in a Zelda fashion, full health it works, otherwise nothing. The issue with the Blue Orb. The game likes to have enemies every once in a while be right next to the screen change, so you enter and bam, cheap shot hit. You may run across more health, but I went for items and usually couldn't find health before the boss where the Orb could be useful. This in itself can be an issue since some changes due to how the placement of how you can view certain areas is, causes you to do leaps of faith, whether its going right/left or dropping down. Not sure why it's a thing. Hit detection at times is a bit eh, but like I said earlier, most of the areas don't really provide much issue to get through, so eh. The story is serviceable, this is the motivation, action! Does what it needs to do. I'll post a video of my first playthrough, if it looks interesting enough for you, give it a shot. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPDZVUeK7YU&feature=youtu.be

Sick secret save/load state buttons. Why are there keys for save and load state? Why is load and save tied to my back shoulder buttons, so when I press them to see what they do, I set a state at the beginning of the game. Then I get to accidentally load the state when I try to alt f4 the game, because you bound LOAD STATE TO F4. Take your fucking dev tools out of the game, don't bind them to keys people press on a daily basis, and for the love of god don't bind them to a controller. Why can I cancel my attack animation, with my own attack animation? Why, when I crouch to hit a crawling enemy, do you cancel your attack animation? You want me to crouch to hit them, but if I try and walk into a crouch state, you cancel all my attack animations until I have come to a complete stop? This would be completely fine if you didn't give me a gimped as sword, made of water, which has 2 different size/lengthed swings depending on if I jump/crouch or stand. Neither of them being long enough to compensate for the fact that your sub weapons, besides the shuriken, go not far enough, or too far.

Slightly edited review: When I first reviewed this game I gave it a thumbs down, not because the game was bad, but because it was lacking a save feature of any kind. The developer was absolutely fantastic in how he chose to deal with this issue. He listened to my concerns, explained his reasoning for why it was done that way, and then added in a quicksave feature to accomodate players like me who love retro games but don't always have the time to play through the game in one sitting. The fact that a developer would take the time to listen to the concerns of a single customer and update the code to add in a feature is great and developers like him who take the time to address customers issues should absolutely be supported. Other than that the game is a decently done castlevania clone. Your character has a sword instead of a whip, and orbs instead of hearts power up your sub weapons. The sub weapons are exaclty what you would expect, an axe that arcs, holy water that flames, an green thing that restores health, but the cross has been replaced by a ninja star and there is no stopwatch in sight. You collect orbs by breaking torches and candles, when you break torches and candles they either drop orbs(hearts), coins(money bags), or turkey legs. Any of this sound familiar? The standard sword swing is very similar to alucards in SOTN, but the crouching sword swing has this really awkward delay which makes it difficult to use and the range is less than when standing which is just weird and unneccessary. Level design is fair and takes place initially in the countryside until you make your way into a casle and you fight enemies like bats, skeletons that throw bones, zombies, flying creatures that zig zag through the screen, giant armored knights, among other things. Each level ends with a boss fight, when the boss is defeated a red orb materializes in the center of the screen that refills your health and ends the level. Deja vu anyone? Having said all that, I saw the trailer and wanted a castlevania clone since I am a huge fan of the series. I got what I paid for, and if you are a fan of classic castlevania then I am sure that you will enjoy this game. There are also 3 separate ttitles in this game, I have only played through chapter 1 as of this writing and will update the review if anything comes up as I play through the next 2 chapters in the game.