Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night Reviews
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is a love letter for all the fans that waited for a real new Castlevania game. Igarashi delivered what he promised 5 years ago.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night could be one of the biggest surprises this year. For Castlevania fans, this represents the best chance you'll ever have to experience that franchise's golden days. For everyone else, this game is a tightly paced and engaging explore-'em-up that will devour your attention span and reward you appropriately.
Koji Igarashi returns on his Kickstarter promise with Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, a beautiful and feature rich game that is a must-buy.
Aside from some minor performance issues and localization typos barely worth mentioning, Bloodstained is an incredible feat in independent video game development. I’ll be coming back to this one for years to come.
Koji Igarashi and his team have composed another exceptional symphony in Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night.
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is a worthy follow up to the Castlevania games that many grew up with in terms of its exploration, but lacks some much-needed polish in the combat and animation department to truly shine as a modern gem
Aside from a few script malfunctions and some odd enemy behavior at points, this is a perfect Metroidvania game. If you are a fan of the genre, a fan of Castlevania, a fan of Metroid, or just a fan of 2D platformers in general, you owe it to yourself to pick this one up.
If you're into post-Symphony of the Night Castlevania, you will find with Bloodstained : Ritual of the Night what you wanted. It doesn' have the name or the same setting, but the feeling and the atmosphere are the same, with some very generous content and a lot of nods to the Konami series. It could have been a lot more polished wisually speaking, felt more of like a game of this era, but how can we be frustrated to get what Koji Igarashi and his team were expected to do ?
Review in French | Read full review
A competent Metroidvania that will entertain for ten to fifteen hours.
It's been a hot minute since the Kickstarter for Koji Igarashi's new game wrapped up and Castlevania fans have a good reason to celebrate on how this turned out.
...a modern game in the spirit of the post-Symphony of the Night Castlevania titles, you can't do much better than this.
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, for lack of a better description is a modern-day Castlevania game. It's typical Koji Igarashi gameplay at its finest and fans of his works will find everything here very familiar. Lots of stuff to do, enjoyable gameplay and a game that has more than enough to offer fans of the genre. The four-year wait was worth it.
After years of development and a handful of delays, Koji Igarashi’s highly anticipated return to gaming is perfection personified, or close to it. It is one of the finest side-scrolling action-RPGs that you’ll play, with beautifully stylistic and colorful visuals that work wonderfully with the 2.5D presentation. The endgame grind may be too much of an investment, but I love every moment of it, especially considering how much I enjoy the hack-and-slash gameplay and being able to swap between my customized presets at any moment. It may feel quite familiar to his previous work but sets the bar for the series moving forward.
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night doesn't reinvent the idea of what a Castlevania game should be, but it does a better job than any of its contemporaries at emulating that classic formula that Konami have long abandoned. While it's technically got a few issues they're hurdles that I am sure it will overcome. Still, in a market that's flooded with imitations, Bloodstained is the real deal. A true successor to Castlevania that fans and newcomers will easily sink their teeth into.
Overall, there is little wrong with Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. Some of the sections have a trial and error feel, meaning you might lose and that will cost you progress, though the overall game achieves what it wants. As a fan of those games, I got a similar impression of this as I did with Castlevania: Harmony of Despair. If you're up for looking around every corner, work on your moves and invest in the story, it's hard not to see the value of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night.
A worthy successor to the legacy laid out by Symphony of the Night that stands on its own with a compelling new universe and highly customizable build system.
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is everything Castlevania fans could possibly want and is a great 2D action platformer in its own right.
So, what we've got in Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is a well-designed game that's poorly developed. A championship-caliber team that needs another few months (or perhaps another year) of training camp. 505 Games has promised to fix the glaring problems, but I can't review a game based on promises. There's still some fun to be had here, but it shouldn't have been released in its current state. Wait for the updates. If they don't come, wait for a sale…and stay away from the bookshelves.
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is a comfortable return for Koji Igarashi. It doesn't push any boundaries, but it's a fluid, well-crafted labor of love with tons of content and a satisfying core gameplay loop.
While gameplay on the Switch is poorly optimized, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is (to steal a Symphony of the Night meme) more than a "miserable pile of secrets." In its purest form, it is worthy of Koji Igarashi's legacy and will live on as a strong representation of the genre he helped birth. With matured mechanics with the shards system, options for varied play styles, and the edition of quests, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night will join the ranks of high quality Metroidvania titles worth replaying over and over again.