A look at Citadale: The Legends Trilogy, an adventure not worth embarking upon

Monsters, evil overlords and old-school inspired levels and music await you in Citadale. I gave this tiresome adventure a go so you didn’t have to.

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Note: Key provided by developer.

Let’s address the elephant in the room right away: if you’ve ever seen or played an old Castlevania game, Citadale looks incredibly similar at first glance. It also looks very similar at second glance. Indeed, when you actually play it, there’s no mistaking that the game has tried to copy the formula as closely as it could. The attempt at mimicry is so complete that it’s hard to call this game an homage like titles such as Shovel Knight or Axiom Verge and instead it is better termed an outright clone.

Everything is lifted straight from those early Castlevania adventures and presented to the player in a straightforward fashion. Sure, the plot doesn’t need to be more complex than “there’s an evil overlord and you should stop him” but the backstory about the characters doesn’t need to be quite so close to the Belmonts and their allies. Just like the various sub items you pick up on each level don’t need to be almost mechanically and visually the same. You can have holy water, an ax and more but it’s not a problem if you put your own twist on things as a game designer. Breakable lamps and torches dropping items, including meaty drumsticks that restore your health, is less of a nod than it is creative laziness. The few innovations the game does present, including new items, are just too rare.

Levels in this game are incredibly short and not that interesting. In the first chapter, it’s about three or four scrolling screens before you get to the boss. Subsequent chapters try to be a little less linear in progression with some backtracking or looping but aren’t much longer. These are your basic platforming with enemies sprinkled here and there, occasionally making it necessary that you kill them all before progressing. At some moments, there’s a few tricky platforms, making slightly careful timing necessary, but the levels aren’t challenging by themselves. There’s no lives system and you can generally restart at checkpoints no worse for the wear.

The boss fights are uninspired, to say the least, with the enemy design being passable but things being more an exercise in patience and memorization than actual skill. One fight that had an enemy thrust up from below had me quickly frustrated, as it was easy enough to dodge but the short reach of the main character’s weapon meant that more often than not I got splashed with damaging acid if I wasn’t positioned just right. It wasn’t hard to understand what I had to do but it was unnecessarily drawn out as I could only get in a hit or two before I had to wait for the creature to disappear and come back once again onto the stage.

The above image illustrates the dull boss fights best: the large spiders move up and down slowly, such that you can only hit them when they’re completely down. Meanwhile they spawn smaller spiders. The strategy to defeat them? Stand still next to them, jumping and hitting attack and occasionally crouch down to hit the small spiders. This doesn’t require anything but a masochistic penchant for tedium. If you don’t have that, you’ll be hard pressed to care enough to beat some of the later bosses.

Art-wise, the game tries to ape the pixelated style of those early Castlevanias. I was unimpressed for the most part with the game’s own implementation of many of these classic foes: zombies, skeletons and all those typical foes look mostly bland. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not holding up the very limited 8 and 16 bit art style of those early Castlevania games as the pinnacle of art. But they were limited by necessity, not choice. However, here, this feels like something that was done just because rather than a carefully considered design choice. Many other retro-inspired games have their own style and have expanded upon these limitations in clever or appealing ways. This is sadly not the case here and the few original assets look weirdly smooth and incongruous.

The music in the game is an occasional bright spot in Citadale. It is, of course, a chiptune soundtrack and sometimes nears on being memorable and catchy. Most of the time, however, the bleeps and bloops sound a bit muddied and the melodies merely serviceable. Thankfully the game is short so you aren’t subjected to the worst offenders for very long, though I’ll admit that the boss theme got on my nerves before long. It’s certainly not something that can be compared to the very fondly-remembered Castlevania repertoire.

On the technical side of things, the only issue I had with the game was iffy gamepad support. It’s not exactly a dealbreaker as, having only really directional keys, a jump and an attack, it’s a game that can be played comfortably with a keyboard.

I said earlier that Citadale was a Castlevania clone. And I spent more time comparing this game to classic Castlevania adventures than perhaps would seem fair. The problem is that this is a game with barely much of its own identity; the close aping of everything Castlevania barely gives it legs enough to stand on its own merits. It tries very little that’s new or interesting and mimics many of the shortcomings of those old games, such as occasionally questionable physics. This game may superficially look the part but captures very little of the essence of what made old-school Castlevania games compelling. As a result it’s hard to recommend this one to any sort of gamer.

You can grab Citadale on Steam.