I love metroidvanias. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is my favourite video-game of all time (I end up revisiting every now and then) so I have a certain weakness for games where you explore a big map made up of several interconnected zones, defeat enemies and gain experience and gain new items and power-ups that help you get to places you couldn’t reach before. So, when I saw people going on about this game I was curious. After all, I hadn’t heard of it back when it was released 7 years ago.
To my defense, that happened because it was an Xbox 360 Live Arcade exclusive, so it flew way under my radar. This remaster is available for PC, Xbox One and PS4 so I finally ended up hearing about it. I started informing myself to see what was the deal because people seemed to speak wonders of it, and after playing it I can say the praise is well deserved.
In the game we play as Jason Fleming, a regular guy. He’s so regular he’s voiced by Nolan North. He’s hiking on the mountains with his girlfriend Claire, she disappears so he starts looking for her and stumbles upon a hidden military complex, and that’s when shit hits the fan.
Don’t expect it to have much of a story though, the game has a minimalistic approach, it’s all in the small details. Speaking of the story, this game has some weird circumstances to it as it’s set in the same universe as two recent Orson Scott Card novels (Empire and Hidden Empire) with this game acting like a bridge between them. Card did not have the original idea for this, though. CHAIR merely licensed the property to him to write the novels and had Peter David write the story for this game.
For a metroidvania, this game had some interesting twists. You move in 2D, but enemies can come at you from the back of the screen, or from places you don’t really walk to but you can shoot at them anyway. Sometimes you will be able to use turrets and you’ll have people coming at you from all sides; the only issue with this is that the aiming is a bit iffy. You can also use the environment to kill enemies, like throwing a grenade in an air vent or shooting some electrical wiring and you can also do melee takedowns on the enemies, which get even cooler once you start getting the armour (two words for you: FALCON PUNCH!)
The influences from this game really show, as the developers admittedly spent a lot of time playing Castlevania: Symphony of the Night or Metroid games like Super Metroid, Fusion, or Zero Mission, and that shows
You will end up backtracking a lot, as you will get new upgrades and sub-weapons that will help you progress (you can open certain doors with certain weapons, and your flashlight will help you see what you need). Most of the upgrades are optional but they will certainly make things easier, getting some can be challenging (two aren’t marked properly in the map) but you still should take your time and explore around because the game encourages you to explore, and rewards you if you do. You gain experience by killing enemies and also by exploring the environment. When you level up you will get better stats (not health, you have to hunt for those upgrades) and at a certain level you will unlock the whole map.
The level cap is at 50 but you won’t really get there on a single game (unless you decide to spend a lot of time killing enemies), the levelling carries over as a sort of New Game +, and I say ‘sort of’ because only the level and stats are carried, you will still have to get the other upgrades and weapons.
While I enjoyed playing this game, the story didn’t trap me as much as other games like these do. Although I appreciated the minimalistic approach to it, or the random conversations between the enemies. I also encountered some bugs that hindered my progress a bit, one in particular made me fall through the map until I ended up in another room, which made the game work alright again.
Despite these minor things, Shadow Complex is well worth your money, I’m not sure about what changes this has compared to the original but that’s beside the point, I liked this a lot. If you’re going for a completionist approach, it might take you around 10 hours to finish the game, there are also some challenge maps and if that wasn’t enough the game offers a lot of replayability, not only because your level carries over but because the game even encourages playthroughs where you get to finish the game on a short time or with the bare minimum of items, which sounds like an almost impossible feat.
Angry Spaniard, adoptive Irishman. Writer, reader, tea drinker and video game player/designer.
