14 DAY TRIAL // Castlevania: Lords of Shadow delivered a pretty fun experience back in 2010, shedding new light into the universe of the classic Konami series.
Now, with Lords of Shadow 2, Spanish developer MercurySteam is preparing to debut Lords of Shadow 2, a sequel that continues the story and shows a new stage in the saga of Dracula.
Until its release later this month, a demo has just been released across the PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 platforms. Does it manage to paint a pretty picture? Let's have a quick look.
Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 focuses on Dracula, formerly known as Gabriel Belmont, who now lives in a castle that's being invaded by the forces of the rest of the Belmont clan, who want to destroy him by sending in holy paladins and warriors.
The demo shows off quite a few intense fighting sequences and includes the main weapons of the protagonist, like the primary Blood Whip, which can unleash all sorts of attacks. There are also two other items, the Void Sword, which drains the health from enemies and replenishes your own, and the Chaos Claws, which are handy when dealing with enemies equipped with shields, as they can easily break them into little pieces.
Combat is quite fluid and pretty challenging, mostly because it's a bit hard to distinguish when enemies are preparing to attack and when they're just caught in the fight animations. As such, prepare to get hit quite a bit.
Luckily, once an enemy has low health, you can approach him and drain his blood via a small quick-time event. This replenishes your health to some degree and looks quite awesome.
The boss encounter is pretty fun and his attacks are varied but the platforming gimmicks, which rely on the boss to fire arrows and dislodge certain pieces of the environment, are repeated a bit too much, losing their special nature.
Even so, the game is quite fun overall and looks rather impressive on the PC, as you can see in the video above. You can download Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 demo right now from Softpedia for PC, and for the PS3 and Xbox 360.
The title launches on PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 on February 25 in North America and February 28 in Europe.