Castlevania: Lords of Shadow - Mirror of Fate was developed by Mercury Steam and released in 2013.

Mirror of Fate's story is one to bridge the gap between Lords of Shadowd and Lords of Shadow 2.  You start off in a prologue tutorial playing as Gabriel along with other members of the Brotherhood of Light sealing away a demon before it skips to the future as Simon.  Simon's father Trevor went to kill Dracula but before his return, the town was attacked and destroyed with Simon being the only survivor.  Years pass and Simon ventures towards Castlevania in revenge for the death of his father. 

Mirror of Fate takes place along four chapters, the prologue and three acts, with four playable characters.  Although different characters, the combat is the same and whatever level one character is on, every other character retains that characters experience level and combat skills, though each character has different spells and subweapons.  The game is a 2.5D platformer yet it integrates the combat system used by the first Lords of Shadow very well.  You have quick attacks that attack in one direction as one button, with slower wide range attacks being another button.  Jumping after an attack will slash the whip upwards allowing to  combo the enemy in air, etc.  While you don't pick and choose the attacks you learn, there's an experience system which rewards the players with new attacks and combos after each level up.  Your character doesn't take off more damage or gain defense when leveling up, just increases the amount of attacks the character can do.  Health upgrades, magic upgrades, and sub weapon upgrades are scattered throughout the games world. 

Enemies have normal and unblockable attacks, while the characters can also block, synchronized blocking, and evade.  After taking enough damage from an enemy and is flashing, the character can grab them for an instant kill.  In past Castlevania games, and most Japanese platformers, enemy attacks as well as running into enemies takes damage.  The AI on this game is good and they've done away with the whole, enemy needs to touch you to damage you.  Enemies can block and take more damage than on other games.  Later in the game it won't take too many hits to kill the character, so you still have to dodge or block attacks while dealing damage as well.

Aside from one boss which both portions of the battle are two separate gimmicks to defeat him, most bosses are actually good battles.  The only problem with them is that they don't offer as much of a challenge as they could, and it's not that they don't provide a challenge, it's a matter of regardless which boss you face, there's atleast one checkpoint when you reduce a bosses damage by a certain amount that lets you restart at that point.   

Mirror of Fate is a mixture of your classic Castlevania series with the exploration games in the series like Symphony of the Night.  The game is open world world and as you progress you can go back to any part of the map you've been previously.  There's a section of the game that has warp points that allow you to warp to different sections of the castle, and some areas that lead into one another.  The game isn't just classic in the sense that you don't get more powerful as you level up, but also when it comes to platforming.  There are both elements of Lords of Shadow style platforming where you're climb from ledge to ledge as well as your average platforming, but the game introduces fall damage, and instant death if you miss a platform when jumping from higher up.  In most sections it makes sense that you die automatically whenever you miss a jump because you fall to your death, although in one spot early in the game, you can actually see the floor below you but you still die when falling.  They actually did a really good job making the game keep the class feel to it while still keeping exploration.  Whoever developes Castlevania in the future should really use this gameplay mechanic.

I mentioned the checkpoints against bosses and really the worst part about the game is that the difficulty is too forgiving with all the checkpoints.  The game auto saves, and The first time you play, every scroll you pick up from a body and every upgrade it auto saves so those are their own checkpoints.  However, even without those, each time you get progress a bit through the map, maybe a set of platforms here, or going to a new floor on the map, it updates the save.  So whenever you die, you're never too back from where you were.  I think it'd been better if they had the checkpoint at the beginning of the screen, because there's little penalty for failure other than trying again, and you've got infinite lives in this game.

In terms of graphics, it's one of the best looking games on the 3DS and has a massive improvement using the 3D effect.  The 3D effect in Lords of Shadow - Mirror of Fate is easily the best on the system in my opinion.  No other game comes even remotely close to how good this game pulls off the effect.  The 3D effect not only makes the graphics look better because that detail stands out more, but the 3D effect actually produces an amazing amount of depth to literally every object.  Everything in the background doesn't look like a flat image on a different plane, literally everything on screen has a large amount of depth to it. 
 
I think Castlevania: Lords of Shadow - Mirror of Fate is a great game and the best in the Lords of Shadow series.  It's got its problems but overall a great platformer.

Gameplay - 9
Design - 8
Presentation - 9
Balance - 8

Overall - 8.5

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Scoring system.

1-3 - bad
4 - 5 below average
5.5 - average
6 - 10 - good to excellent

The kuporeview inflation score.  What the score would be if the average game was 7/10 like IGN, Gamespot, etc.  Since I don't inflate scores and my scores are underrated compared to what people come to expect I came up with an equation to inflate my scores to make them similar to others.  http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=177193&page=1#1 
 
Lords of Shadow review http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=179671&page=1#
Lords of Shadow 2 review http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=179673&page=1#