Castlevania Curse of Darkness was released by Konami in 2005 for the PS2 and Xbox.
Prior to his death in 1476, Dracula trained two humans to be generals in his army called devil forgemasters. These devil forgemasters power rivaled even Dracula's second in command, Death. After Dracula's death, Hector married and left that life behind, but in order to lure him to Dracula's castle, Isaac kills his wife. Some parts in the story are decent, but the story is just bad, even the premise of it. Dracula training two humans, even though he's cursed humanity for all eternity, there's even a character that's introduced several times in the story who could be completely left out and the story would have been better. IGA putting the character into the game as a sort of representation of himself.
Castlevania Curse of Darkness is a 3D exploration Castlevania, but since you're not playing as a Belmont, your character is no proficient with more than just the whip. Hector can use short swords/axes, thrusting swords, long swords, fists, spears, and then other special weapons. Most weapons follow I think five combo sets but there are some that have unique sets. Although even though these weapons have "combo sets" it's little more than hitting the square button one to five times and then hitting circle afterwards. Depending on the enemy and depending on your equipped devil, you might repeatedly use one attack instead of another, but the majority of the time for each weapon you'll be repeating the same combo over and over. There are some advanced techniques that the game doesn't tell you about, like holding block and hitting attack will slash upwards, while pressing attack then jump immediately after will do an upwards kick where you'll follow the enemy for up to four attacks with no finisher. Depending on your innocent devil, hitting the attack or finisher button when a exclamation point comes up, the devil will teleport to the enemy and attack them with one or the other move(depending which button you pressed.) I haven't played any Dynasty Warriors on the new consoles, but the combat system on this game is basically the earlier Dynasty Warriors games with a little bit more depth to the combat. Enemies on Curse of Darkness are also a bit more competent than the soldiers in that game.
Hector can also evade, double evade, perfect guard, and even steal. However each of these abilities are pick ups that you "should" see as you're progressing through the game but if you don't grab them, there's no way to learn them without walking all the way back to wherever they are if you can find them. Stealing is actually a unique feature added to an action game and while it does get old long before the end of the game, it's actually pretty unique at first. Every single enemy in the game has an item that you can still, and every single enemy also has a different way that you can steal their item. Some enemies you have to wait until they do a certain attack, other enemies you have to perfect guard, some you have to perfect guard a certain attack. It's actually really annoying when you have to perfect guard an attack that is not only hard to steal the item afterwards, but the enemies do this attack once every five minutes. When you have lock on and are targetting an enemy, you know you'll be able to steal from them when the target changes purple, which you'll hit the finisher button by itself and your character will do a short dash forward to steal an item. If it's no longer purple when you press the button the window of opportunity is gone. Hector can create weapons and armor with the materials that enemies drops or those he steals.
I mentioned them above, but innocent devils are ai helpers that follow you around once you acquire them. There are some helpers that don't attack, like the fairy, or if they do, the bird, they can't be attacked back. Each innocent devil gains magic spells as it levels up, sometimes curative, sometimes attack spells, and each innocent devil can level up through multiple different paths. Sometimes enemies will drop evolution shards and which element is dropped depends on what type of weapon the enemy was killed with. Some elements might fill the left path of the evolution charge, others might fill the right path. After you branch out and get to one path, there are more paths to take, so there are several final forms of the innocent devils with different support attacks and different spells. Innocent devils also help Hector traverse the environment. One will knock down a wall to open a new path, the bird he'll hold onto to fly him across a gap that Hector can't jump across, etc.
Similar to Lament of Innocence, but far worse, Curse of Darkness has Hector running along long hallway after long hallway. While a lot of hallways were short in the previous game with a locked room and enemies to fight afterwards, some of the hallways on Curse of Darkness are extremely long with few and far enemies between. Not only that but the speed that Hector runs slow. Maybe IGA was going for that Castlevania Adventure feel when it comes to character speed because that's really how fast he moves. Once you get double evade you can evade and wait a second and keep doing that everywhere to increase your speed a bit, but you'll still be traveling through some insanely long hallways with nothing in between.
Trevor Belmont makes a few appearances in the game and one completing the game he becomes a playable character. If you've played Lament of Innocence it's sort of similar as you can switch between regular attacks and the finisher button to have a little bit more diversity in his combos, but it's a very watered down version. Trevor can also use any of his special weapons at any time . While playing as Trevor you get no experience, but you can find stat upgrades throughout the game.
3/10
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Scoring system.
1-3 - bad
4 - 5 below average
5.5 - average
6 - 10 - good to excellent
