Castlevania: Grimoire of Souls

A recently resurrected version of a Canadian gatcha game from 2019 but now it’s been to AA and is less evil! Gameplay focuses on short (3-5 minute) stretches of Castlevania levels that actually do look and feel like proper Castlevania. There’s about a week of semi-serious play to be had right now with promises of more on the way. It does feel a little unfinished, but mostly in ways you’ll only notice at endgame. The ability to quickly repeat a level when grinding is bizarrely absent, requiring you to go through multiple screens of details and equipment to repeat something you just did. Also some high-rarity items require you to equip more items of a given element than currently exist in the game to activate their passives. Minor gripes, but a solid quality of life pass and some extra levels could do a lot for the game as it is now.

This is the only mobile game I have ever taken the time to review. As an avid Castlevania fan, it has been many years since I have had so much excitement for the series. This game is amazingly well put together, and remarkably has a canon story. With controller support already implemented, this game deserves a PC port like Yu-Gi-Oh Duel Links. No Castlevania fan should miss out on this game. It is not your average mobile title, while there are daily login bonuses and a little bit of gotcha game devices, it looks like everything in the game can be obtained through gameplay, and there is no time limit to how much you can play other than daily trials missions. It’s great to see characters throughout the timeline interact with each other and the gameplay is great. The touchscreen controls work about as good as you can make touchscreen controls, but there is complete controller support worked into the game. Overall, this game honestly is a masterpiece. The only shame is that this game is only available on mobile, and more specifically, only the apple arcade. I would pay money ($10-20) for a PC port of this game with update support. I’m talking to you, Konami!!! Between the success Super Smash Brothers, Netflix, and the new Getsu Fuuma game, you know that the people want more Castlevania! A PC/Switch port of this game is the next step!

Book 4 boss is bugged or something. I’ve got Alucard at 40,000 strength and I’m only doing 80 damage to the boss… I beat him with Belmont with no big issues, but Al is doing a tiny fraction of the damage. So another reviewer says you get 1000% more rewards for perfecting a level than when this was F2P elsewhere. It is still not enough to be called a premium game. Drop rates of rare and legendary gear are horrible. Now on book 4 i have only won 4 pieces of legendary gear from summons… 48 stages perfected= 4 legendary… for 5 characters. Horrible. However the worst part is leveling up weapons and characters. Your 5 characters each equip 4 weapons and 5 pieces of gear: 5x(4+5)= 45 gear you need to constantly upgrade to stay up with the difficulty requirement. This was fine up through Book 4, where the level req. is suddenly much higher than even my strongest ally. The weapon trial awards at this level are horribly inadequate; I have to play them about 8-9 time to max out (lvl 15-35) ONE gear piece… and I’ve got 9 per character. So, I stop my adventure here where the Grind to level up has become unbearable. It is too bad, too, because the gameplay looks great and plays well. It would have been better if they ripped out all of the F2P loot boxes and just given us balanced gameplay without the grind.

Not bad at all and I LOVE that they actually want you to put a bit of effort in to unlock things rather than pay to play, gives a better sense of connection to the game. Sometimes the rolls dont make sense like doing a 10x summon with not even a purple but for instance like today I got 2x 5 star weapons on a 10x summon. The special mission is kinda weird like I can't progress till I claim 10 logic bonuses, minor but to me just weird considering it took only 6 days to beat whats currently playable and get 3 skulls on every mission. I cant wait to see whats next the story is good and feels just like a better version of the original in terms of combat, weapon/element types, enemies and bosses/mini bosses, overall a good way to get into the castelvania series if you're unfamiliar and a good way to pass time. It will definitely feel weird and confusing at first how things work but after awhile trust me you'll be 1 shotting common enemies and 5 shotting bosses in no time. In 6 days already 38k overall equip level with alucard and rank 27. Would recommend

Game started great and you plays well on Apple TV. There is occasional missed jump input on a controller but it is good most of the time. There is a huge amount of currencies and upgrades which is overwhelming. But you in theory can look past it. After you get to book four you get a huge increase in the equipment requirement. Like double the power you have to beat the previous boss. This is pretty much a pay wall that they brought into Apple Arcade. Apple Arcade mission is to get rid of thing like that. Why do you do it? Let people finish the game and enjoy the story. You gotta learn a different way to hook people in instead of just asking them to play levels over and over again. Game even has the skip mechanics but then you have to wait till next day. A good game ruined by free to play mechanics. Dear Apple please pay attention to the games you are bringing in. Game looks good on the surface and then uncovers it’s true face later. I was praising Apple Arcade to my friends, saying this is a place for good games not that are not ruined by free to play mechanics. Place where game developers can create games and not addictions. And look where are we now :(

Where to start. First off it holds true to the Castlevania spirit only in its art work, beyond that what a shame this game is. Everything about this game is to satisfy the “mobile” spirit of gaming. Castlevania in its core has always been 2D side scrolling action at its best and while some have failed to live up to that spirit some have failed miserably, but if you’re going to use Alucard from symphony of the night as your star role, your game better live up to that standard. This game does not. The progressive stage select system interrupts the core essence of Castlevania making it feel more like a mobile game than an actual video game. The fact that is even has “in game purchases” completely ruins the spirit of the game and makes it feel more like a cash grab for a company that has already consumed billions of dollars off of this franchise. Graphics are fantastic and the music really takes me back to those old glory days of side scrolling action at its very best! But this game in its core betrays everything I feel about Castlevania and I for one will not give this “game” anymore of my time or effort. As a wise VH once said “Die monster! You don’t belong in this world!”

Let me start by saying that I’m writing this review as a counterpoint to the other reviews already posted (writing reviews before actually playing the game, misrepresenting the actual gameplay, making assessments before getting past the tutorial). If you are a fan of 2d side scrollers AND a fan of Castlevania games on the Gameboy Advanced, you will love this game. If you didn’t care for Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, then you probably won’t enjoy much here. The familiar gameplay is here, with the added replay value of playing as different characters from the Castlevania legacy. Add to this the flexibility of trying different weapons and armor, along with the mission system and you get a gaming experience that is perfectly tuned to the controller-less mobile experience (using a controller is totally worth it). If this is your first “Castlevania”, you will definitely want to play all the classics. When you finish this game, spend the money on SOTN.

The intro cutscenes and the music were pretty good. Aside from that I’m struggling to find positives. I went into the game with an fresh mind, as I don’t have much experience with this genre. However I expected some aspects of exploration and a strong plot driven narrative to immerse me into the world. Unfortunately expectation and reality are two different things. What really astonished me is that it’s a gatcha game. They use in game crystals for micro transactions instead of money for summoning 1-5 star weapons. No comments about the rng but this style does not fit a game like this that’s being marketed as an arcade game!! It’s a shame the game turns out to be a button mash with just some levels to clear. Grind, collect resources, power up weapons rinse and repeat. That’s the generic formula here. Which brings us to the topic of level design and enemy design———simply underwhelming. All in all the game is a grind and a gatcha. I believe the essence and the experience of Castlevania is lost. I can generously hash out a 2 stars . This game belongs in the main App Store with “in app purchase” games not on the arcade.

First of all. More characters to come. Sounds amazing. Controls are situational. Some characters need semi auto attack on and some don’t. And some stages might switch that order. There’s a bit of input lag. You notice it the most with controllers. Touch screen still has the input lag but much more manageable. Otherwise input feels smooth all around. It’s not classic Castlevania but just as good. Each stage is only meant to occupy 3-5 minutes of your time. When you beat the stage, you’re left in a good place. Wasn’t too short, wasn’t too long. If you lose the stage it can aggro the calmest of gamers too meaning It’s easy but challenging at the same time. Progression is fair. The pulling for equipment was weird at first but if you play like it’s a regular gatcha game you will have a bad time. Save gems for what? Pull your equipment, Fuse the scrolls from the repeat equipment you pulled to make better equipment. Rinse repeat. 5* stuff will come eventually. Between weeklies, dailies, and dispatch, gems shouldn’t be a problem. Just use em! (Side note) Equipment upkeep becomes a hassle when approaching lvl 20 and above. It feels like a hassle to manage all that gear for 5 characters… and again in the game description it says new characters coming. That’s a lot of upgrade stones to farm! Awesome Game

I'm not sure if the other people that left reviews actually played the game even to the first boss. It supports a controller, but movement is restricted to analog stick. The D-pad doesn't work. This makes precise movement difficult. Stages are quite linear. It can take as little as 1 minute to get through them. There is almost zero back-tracking or exploring. This is nothing like SotN. Goals are sometimes vague. You have to defeat a "target" that may or may not be encountered. Does the target show up randomly? Is it hidden? I've retried a stage several times, exploring ever possible area, killing every single enemy and I still missed my "target". Progression is incredibly slow. This game was obviously made to be Pay 2 Win, but with the removal of the ability to pay for anything, you're left to rely on daily rewards and grinding the same levels over and over. You can spend all your gems to completely max a weapon's levels and still find yourself completely out of your league. You simply need to "summon" more and more items until you get something rare enough to be leveled up higher. Summoning items and enhancing them requires countless gems and gold and other currencies that you simply have no way of purchasing in this version of the game. It's a bad game, limited by Apple Arcade. And yet I see that most people have given it good reviews.

This game is a total troll game. Enemies are overly hard. Endless stunlocking. Controls are laggy and unresponsive. Insanely inaccurate movements. Straight from the rip. Game expects you to know how to move , run, dodge and everything, when you try to attack but enemies attack same time but you can’t end attack motion to dodge because game is laggy and unresponsive for touch controls and just take an insanely 30% hp damage from a regular mobs. Bosses are HP sponges with endless attacks so you can’t even do much damage. Game throws endless tasks without you even slowly learning the game. Game just throws you in expecting you to be a master player without easing you into it and slowly learning. This game is only for end game players or dark souls elitists. A sadistic Beat them up where all the edge is given to the AI and very punishing game. This is not an “arcade” game and has an insane difficult spike in the first few levels….. if you like that style game where it’s more of torture than a “game” then this is for you. If not, game needs refining

I would love to get an idea of when the rest of the game is coming out. It does keep a bunch of the f2p mechanics but the Skip button in the Trials (after you pass them with an S rating) lets you autopass them multiple times in one go which makes character and gear improvement vastly improved. I am a bit frustrated by how hard it seems to be to acquire the 5* gear but that should be rare, I suppose… All in all I enjoy it a lot although I wish that I could grind levels more efficiently than having to reload the menu screen, tap through two more screens, then reload the level just to do it over again.

The game is obviously centered around the gacha aspect of summoning for higher tier equipment, but with being on Apple Arcade, there’s no option to pay for gems which I’m fine with. However, the game is centered around stats and higher rarity equipment, which is excessively rare and no rates are posted for summons, despite apple App Store policies that all other games must display the “pull” rates for. I know anecdotal evidence isn’t great, but in my 20 “10 summon” summons, for a total of 200 pieces of gear, I’ve only pulled a single five star. I would leave a 1 star for this system, but it’s not the entirety of the game. Gameplay is “fine”. The prologue and tutorial are great, but as soon as you get into the game proper, you get nerfed with clunky controls and reduced move speed, making the game feel very slow and stiff. Playing with a controller is much better and consistent, but doesn’t save the clunky slow feeling, just lets you control the molasses better.

I’m sad, but not surprised, that Grimoire of Souls lacks the souls of a true Castlevania experience. I got excited when I saw that it was on Apple Arcade, cautiously watched the trailer, and thought, “the art doesn’t hold a candle to Symphony of the Night, but I love Alucard and things change.” But here I am, only a few stages in and completely done. It’s yet another mobile gacha game. The exploration and discovery has been stripped down to linear stages, or so it seems. If that changes down the line, great, but I don’t have faith it will. Get ready to collect materials, spend currencies on summons, and dump spare items into upgrading. I’m sure it’s fine if you’re into the mobile scene, but I’m sad to see this as the first official continuation of Castlevania from Konami in quite sometime, especially after the excellent Netflix series. I’ll hold out hope for a true continuation on consoles and PC, hope to see the Belmonts and Alucard in all their glory again someday.

I love the gameplay and with my razer Kishi it makes it even more enjoyable! I love the gacha mechanics as it’s completely free and can do several summons a day. The parchment system and all of the ways you can get items makes it a lot of fun. However, one thing is bothering me quite a lot. That is, record fragments. I can’t think of any possible reason why you would limit upgrading your abilities to a single branch... I just accidentally spent 2 fragments on a skill I don’t use and now I’m prevented from getting a fully upgraded skill that I actually want. Am I missing something here? Barely got my Shanoa to level 40 and that would’ve given the exact amount of fragments total for one complete skill. Please fix this or allow the shop to sell the fragments once a week or something. Other than that, great game.

I remember a few years ago when Apple sent out a survey asking about Arcade. I said I wanted more in-depth games, and my wife wanted more casual, and I thought at the time they were trying to mix them both too much. My wife has a lot of arcade games she regularly plays, and I’ve found my more complex, grindy f2p-style game I actually want, but don’t have to spend IAP for. Plus it’s Castlevania! The downsides I see from some people are upsides for me. I enjoy f2p models with a cheat mode turned on! Great game, wish the rating was higher so they were encouraged to make more, but I hope even something like this helps. Great job Konami for making it and Apple for buying it outright!

I have not played it yet, I know it is super good, probably as good as a sunny day in the rain. The graphics are insane, like really close to average or even better! I have the game a 5 star rating cause it earned it. Ya, all I have done is hit the “install” button, but that was an entire moment of fun which deserves the 5 stars! Really, just the graphic change from “install” to “downloading” was better than a root canal! Eventually, when my slow WiFi completes the download, maybe by next week, I’ll be able to actually try the game. So excited cause this really is the best game of the year, I think, I hope, I mean…. Well I’m gonna quit my job to play this 24/7 I think!

This game is fun and still captures a bit of that Castlevania spirit. While playing this game for over a month now, at first it was really fun leaving up these characters and replaying levels with different play styles. However, with the fremium mechanic in place, the game really ends up being shallow with no depth. There’s no reason to do anything after the game is complete. Even if new content dropped, the game would still feel stale. There’s just not enough variation to keep the game fresh. Also, coins are just worthless and once you have a 5 star weapon all other equipment is useless! Finally, their seasonal event is just sad. How are you going to just run the same three levels on repeat with them repeating back to back sometimes. That’s just boring and lazy.

I have to admit that this game is indeed an amazing Castlevania title to play, even though it lacks as much fun storyline from its prior titles; don’t expect a full on map. This is Apple Arcade Style in which you go about clearing stages with 3 missions assigned. They stayed true in terms of difficulty. The one thing that keeps me from giving this game a 5 star is the screen controls. It’s almost impossible to enjoy this game to its fullest without a controller such as Backbone or Kishi. The screen controls will sometimes result in an accidental jump, slide or failure to evade. Also, there are times the skills are just plain hard to use. With the controller I was able to enjoy the fullest potential of this game.

The gameplay is pretty good but the drop rate for items is so bad that it takes about 10 hours of gameplay to collect enough parchments to materialize/limit break an item. Each item can (once materialized) be limit broken 4 times meaning that it requires about 50 hours of grinding through the same level to max one item. There are 5 characters each with about 9 5-star weapons plus about 2 sub weapons and then 10 armors which makes 65 items and means about 3250 hours of grinding. And that doesn’t even count enhancing them all. If they increased the drop rate of 5-stars by about 10x then it would be a massively better and more enjoyable game. Summons are not much better. You average about one 4-star summon per 100 summons and one 5-star per 500 summons. Also, the game is quite buggy.

I don’t know what people are talking about when it comes to having to wait or saying it’s too grindy. I literally just beat the 5th boss and am waiting for an update that lets me continue on to more levels. Once you get the flow of the game it becomes easy to strategize and figure out how to make your character stronger. One of the most important things to do is utilize all aspects of the game which means training, summons, etc. Overall I think this is a solid game and it has a pretty good difficulty as well. I’m excited for the update so I can keep playing further levels!

GoS is extremely well written. They obviously did their research, and made all of the different games fit together seamlessly. The dialogue is also rich and interesting. There are no weird translation issues or typos, and one of my favorite parts is being able to collect all the music tracks from each of the games. It’s well balanced too. It’s just challenging enough to make you excited to to replay the levels to meet all the challenges, but not so hard you just rage quit. The controls can be a little tricky but that’s just an artifact of playing on a device with no physical buttons. Well done!

Overall I seem to be enjoying it. It’s a long grind, and some characters perform best with a controller over the touch screen, but it hasn’t really bothered me that much. (Charlotte needs a controller to be at her best, on touch it is difficult to aim high and shoot or even run and power up then jump and shoot, on the controller it is easy) Also on touch I never use the dash attacks or dodge because it doesn’t trigger all the time. On the controller it is just another button so triggers all the time. Another plus is that I can use it offline with barely any noticeable delay once the game is loaded. So the hour train to and from work can be fun. Towards the last couple chapters the difficulty levels jump so fast it’s hard to keep up. Rare Weapon pulls seem to be better with the last update, and the boost in simple searches will help too, so that’s fine. I’m curious how the restart is after beating the game, but I know it’ll take a bit to get there. Thanks for a fun game!

I did buy remote control for the whole arcade since I do subscribe during off school season or vacation. Doing touchscreen as remote is not my forte- lag issue when doing touchscreen mode. The game is more responsive (sadly) when one has an Apple TV device; it handles the game nicely vs tablet or mobile device. I played this for a while and it’s great for few several months then it just gets boring and blah the longer you continue playing, because it just becomes repetitive. Storyline is great but doing same task should you get only 1 or 2 ‘star’ or need to ‘level up’ as the mission gets challenging further-one can easily get burnt out.

Just wanted to input my two cents and say that being a long time Castlevania fan that this game is wonderfully done. The only thing I would have liked to have seen is some sort of zoom in feature as of course I got to wear glasses and would like to see it as one of those classic games in scale of what was shown on the screen. Other than that a wonderful game, only one issue I have is that my save data was rolled back I was on the third book and about half way through and lost all my progress. Is there anyway to get this back? Thanks.

It’s obvious this was originally a Pay to Win game. There’s so many different types of currencies in this game, and for all of them, there’s astronomically-priced items that you could not attain through normal play time. Why weren’t these items reduced in price? I don’t know. It’s also frustrating how hard it is to level-up anything. It requires hours of grinding and replaying the same few levels because the idea was to get people to pay to advance. Apple should have done a better job working with Konami to remove and refine anything that made this game feel like a bait-and-switch is going to happen, because the whole game isn’t available…

I’ve been playing this game for a while now, and it’s really not that bad. For reference the main type of game that I play is platformer type games. I’m a huge fan of the originals and still play them often. This game does have a lame currency system, but it is pretty generous. And the currency mechanics really aren’t that complicated once you figure it out. The Castlevania lore is here, and it’s actually kind of fun once you find a character you like and learn their weapons and stuff. It has good graphics and music.

Castlevania fans are all too familiar with their bad blood for Konami, but I don’t think they deserve to be bitten this time. Setting aside the mobile gatcha and cookie-cutter systems, this older freemium is a decent adaptation. That being said, if you’re looking for Castlevania on mobile, you’ll want to grab Symphony of the Night, the only mainline Castlevania currently available on IOS, and arguably the best in the series. There’s also Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, a Castlevania-style series by the creator of Castlevania, but the performance on IOS is reportedly lackluster.

This game is fun, however, when its loading levels it tends to crash a lot. I’m playing it on an iPhone 12 Pro Max with the latest OS. The controls are also quirky. Sometimes they don’t even respond. The characters are slow and there is a delay to start moving again after completing an action; would like if they didn’t have the delay. The enemy leveling to character level/power isn’t very good either. I find the enemies are much stronger at lower levels than they should be in trials and challenges. XP gain is incredibly low so leveling is taking a while. Could easily get bored of this game quick.

It's a good game.. with a few flaws. When canceling dispatches, why does it consume the run? Why are we unable to earn more or increase the number of simple searches? I have noticed that the trials for enhance gems doesn't correctly issue them. For example: Play the hardest tier and kill 3/4 of the mobs an earn a top tier gem. However clear the level perfectly and earn a lesser purple gem instead of a stronger red one. Things like this an more are whats wrong here. Balancing needs to occur. The little girl is virtually useless to play as and cannot jump high enough in certain situations. So many times the screen control system has me attacking or doing something in the reverse direction than what I intended or activating my upper ability when i don't intend to use it. Other times when I want to use an ability the input it entirely ignored or I am outright killed for failing to do or attack properly. Can I get a dev response?

My first Castlevania experience was Simon’s Quest on NES. I love the updated retro look and feel. It does require a bit of a grind, but I’m still enjoying it. It’s a perfect mobile experience made for short or longer periods of play. So good, I bought a controller attachment for my phone just so I could play this. Konami - please keep developing this game. I would love more content. In an age where a goofy game like Homescapes can keep our attention for months on end, this is a breath of fresh air. It’s what Apple Arcade is meant to be!

I have been playing this for a few week's and it's good but it comes to a complete stop once I reached level 40/41. I have all gold weapons maxed out, all armor maxed out with 1 being gold and the rest purple but everything maxed out except the inchant, but very close 9 out of 10 and I'm still 10,000 short to complete the next levels..... Also it does have some bug issue's.... I tried playing this on my Apple Tv but it was unplayable with framew rate's getting into the single digit's so I had to switch to my Mac Mini.

I've been playing for a few days now and rather enjoy it. Learning the characters and which differ, some more than others, is easy and the moves come naturally on screen or controller. The difficultly options are a great addition. The defaults is pretty easy but with a few tweaks you can get extra loot and make things more challenging. If you enjoyed the series thus far I think this game should be no exception and offer hours of entertainment for you.

The game was clearly made entirely with the expectation it would have micro transactions. The cool thing (I thought) about Apple Arcade was it didn’t have micro transactions. While this game does remove the ability to pay for what would normally be micro transactions - it does it in the laziest way possible by keeping all of those mechanics in the game and just only allowing you to mindlessly grind for the things you want It is a level by level side scrolling game as opposed to the sort of open map type levels you normally get from castlevania games The combat for what I did play was okay (if not a bit slow) but the lazily stripped free to play mechanics make it unplayable.

This ver of Castlevania feels more Contra-ish and much shorter gameplay. Contra-ish in the form of a run and hack (gun) style gameplay where you can set the atk to either auto or manual, no back tracking and platforming (Metroidvania like) and the levels are short. The last Castlevania game I’ve played was OoE and HoD and I has hoping this would be more of HoD w/ co-op/competitive play, puzzles, spd running (optional), boss hazard affecting whole map, and “open world” like area that is still encased inside the map area (yt gamepla). Still a decent yet hallow game if you take into account the story and gacha style play. Good thing this game was pulled from GPlay store.

The fighting is fun, I enjoy the variety of moves among the hero’s and I look forward to the story progressing and unlocking new hero’s, but it’s so weird to play a single player gacha game with no micro transactions. Also it’s only 5 books with the 6th waiting for future expansion (given this game was almost canceled I somehow doubt the dev’s are still making content for it) so it feels like it’s only half a game. Which is a shame because I’m enjoying it, want the rest of the levels.

Control is stupid, probably will be better if you got a controller or something, but with iPad/Mac, you are probably doomed. Gacha is there, I suspect the 5* rate is 3% in a multi like all other gachas, however I do not have solid evidence, I mean they could at least display the percentage rate. There is a high barrier, I don’t know how to use double jump to get there, the only working method for me now is double jump, turn back, Maria pigeon skill will boost another jump to get you to the place. I died 5 times beating 1-5? I know I’m not a professional gamer but I do not consider myself a very bad gamer, the control is very idiotic, swipe sometimes don’t work, you probably will get to beaten to death while swiping, god just make the swiping skills be like those buttons. 5$ sounds right, could entertain me for a while. Can’t believe it was a gacha mobile game and do people really pay for this?

I’m fairly new to the Castlevania series in general, but I love playing the game so much. I am very impressed with what they managed to do to a game that used to be a Gacha and improved on it in several ways. This especially rings true with the recent update for the Holidays! It gives me hope that there’ll be somewhat consistent content updates in the future which makes it worth it to keep subscribing to Apple Arcade.

Very fun and addicting game. Slash and walkthrough different environments kind of gameplay. The system of obtaining materials and weapons/armor to upgrade is good but very limited because after you reach a certain point, you can’t progress any more without a ridiculous amount of grinding for materials and experience. If the game could be fixed somehow to remove the need to grind the same levels over and over to progress, it would be a five star 100%.

I had just finished a level and went back to the main play screen with the characters in the foyer area, where you can choose where to go next. The screen went black but Music was still playing. I exited out and went back in. It loaded my save and it was still black. I reset my phone and closed everything out. Loaded it. Still black with music. I have 40 hours into it. Is it something that is patchable?

It’s a great time to be a castlevania fan. Thank you for a real game. I’m 29 in the information/collapse era; I don’t have time for mediocre software. This game respects the original IP and builds on it perfectly for a mobile game. So turn on the latest season of the Castlevania animated series, boot up this game (or if you have a PS5 controller, pair it up and play ‘Symphony of the Night’ instead), and enjoy the sexy gender-fluid magic that is Alucard. Devs - Please don’t stop here. Keep going!

Although I’m an avid Castlevania fan, I would prefer to play this on any other format than the phone (preferably the Nintendo Switch). This game, which I find brilliantly executed, also overheats my phone and continuously is lagged down in gameplay. Now I do have an IPhone X, so that may be the problem, but I’ve played over hundreds of games on this device and have never had this much of a problem. So again, I think this would be a great game for the Switch; to which I wouldn’t hesitate to purchase

It was fun for a while. While it’s easy to complete the grimoires, it is impossible to get most of the 5 star weapons and armor. I’ve played some levels for hours with all difficulty factors ticked off and I still didn’t come close to getting the level 5 weapon for that level. Yes it’s easy to gems, but again they don’t get you very far. 500k gems should get you more than 0-1 high level weapons. Until they fix this, the game will continue having a freemium feel, which is the reason I’d rate this so lowly.

The game is great when it comes to character controls and graphics. I am having a problem with a serious Special Mission glitch. The game will not go pass Special Mission 3 Breakdown even though I have gotten the exact Breakdown and more. It seems like they didn’t run the tests all the way through for Apple TV. I have deleted the game and downloaded it again but still the same problem exist.

We all pay Apple a monthly fee to enjoy various games to get away from the freemium garbage that has been plaguing the App Store like an unwanted cancer for a long time. Sure, no real money is involved but the gameplay mechanics still exist here. Most of us just want to enjoy a game without unnecessary complex menus and convoluted upgrade options. There is absolutely no way that you can consider this game fun. Sure, it looks okay but it is not fun. So far the only fun Metroidvania-style game that I’ve played on Apple Arcade is Shantae and the Seven Sirens.

There is an error when you try to do the mission “don’t let HP drop below 75%”. When you switch to alter arts, it automatically makes you fail the mission. When you fail the mission and you select the new option “play again” it wouldn’t reset the stats of the mission and it would fail regardless of if you achieved the mission the second try.

It’s a very cool game that’s way too complicated. It’s filled with all of the terrible free to play crap that brings me to Apple Arcade in the first place. A bunch of different kinds of gems, limits, limit breaks, collecting weird components, login rewards. The only thing missing is the in app gem store and ches purchase screen I just don’t understand. All of those mechanics are there to create a currency system that forced players to spend money on gems. But here, there is no incentive, so I don’t know why the game needs all of this complex menu stuff. Just let me play the game

Overall a great Castlevania experience. Lots of grinding to collect items (parchments etc) but that’s true to Castlevania fashion. My only problem is with the Elgos coins. There’s a lot of weapons and armor for sale that can only be obtained via Elgos coins and there’s no way to earn them other than daily logins and daily missions. I wish they would allow us to buy them via coins or parchments.

I do not understand the positive reviews for this. Unfortunately, this lacks the heart of Symphony Of The Night, or most any other Castlevania game. It was obviously meant to be a Pay game, so you are incredibly limited on progression. You’re basically stuck earning gems on the same levels over and over until you can maybe, hopefully, summon a piece of gear good enough to move forward. Attack speed is also oddly limited, I assume with the auto attack in mind. It feels sluggish. Three hit combos, for days. Very disappointed.

I got Apple Arcade in hopes to get away from all the gacha grinding games just to find out they are being advertised to me in a space I thought was designed to not allow games like this. I was hoping for a spiritual successor to the beloved Castlevania series and got duped into downloading a game that is clearly designed where micro transactions were intended to be in the game. I’m working to play to point to have everything unlocked to make sure that transactions are not an option however the game speaks for itself. Do yourself a favor and pass on this.