Castlevania: Lords of Shadow - Ultimate Edition out now on PC

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow—a game that has so far only been available on consoles—is now available on PC in the form of the Ulimate Edition. The game can be picked up from digital distribution platform Steam for $29.99 (Rs 1,990 approx). Along with the main game, Castlevania: Lords of Shadow – Ultimate Edition includes the Reverie and Resurrection DLC. The game itself also has been visually updated to take better advantage of modern PC hardware.

The game, originally released for the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 back in 2010, is a complete re-imagining of the Castlevania franchise. It acts as a prequel to the main franchise, which has its roots in the NES era. The story revolves around Gabriel Belmont, a member of the brotherhood of Light. He has to track down the mysterious Lords of Shadow in order to unite the pieces of a relic called the God Mask, which can purify the world and has the power to bring the dead back to life.

Kill everything that moves!

Typically, Castlevania games have been side-scrollers, with the early games up to the SNES and Sega Genesis era being linear, save for Castlevania 2: Simon’s Quest. The PlayStation-era Castlevania: Symphony of the Night was the first non-linear game in the franchise to be received well by gamers and critics. Symphony of the Night is the main game responsible for coining the term Metroidvania, which is used to describe non-linear games where one has to backtrack after finding specific pieces of equipment to access new areas that were earlier inaccessible.

That’s not to say that there hasn’t been a 3D Castlevania game before Lords of Shadow, however. Two games were released for the Nintendo 64 that used a 3D graphical engine. These games used Z-lock – the same targeting system that defined the N64’s 3D games such as Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. However, these games were poorly received for their shoddy gameplay mechanics.