Not a boss - this fight should be over quickly.

I’ve noticed that some people seem to be having trouble with the “swipe down” move… probably because there are two different ones. A long swipe down with your finger speeds up the speed the blocks drop, but you can still move left and right while doing it. A short swipe down drops the blocks in place straight away and is a much more useful move, I reckon. If you’re having trouble with the controls, I hope that helps.

Also, you can skip a lot of animations by tapping the screen – including the pointless pre-battle screen.

(Okay, it’s not actually based on Puzzle Fighter. It’s based on a very similar Konami game nobody (i.e. me) has ever heard of.)

It sounds like one of those terrible, terrible cash-ins that pop up on handheld consoles and mobiles, but it’s been executed with such love and care that it actually damn well works.

You play as Alucard, obviously, and have to play through Symphony of the Night, but without any whipping or jumping. You move around a map and in each room you might find an item, an enemy or nothing at all. (Yes, you can choose where to go at certain points. Yes, there are areas blocked off until you get the correct relic to let you get to them.)

If you find an enemy you battle them by destroying falling blocks. Combat is divided into rounds and when the hourglass flips to end a round, you and the enemy damage each other, with the damage dealt being based on your strength stats and the amount of blocks on your respective boards. First one to lose all their hit points loses.

It's hard to keep track of your opponent's board in the heat of battle.

By killing enemies you gain items, money and experience. There are tons of stats to put your experience points into when you level up – I’m concentrating on strength, because I keep forgetting to use spells – and all sorts of items to find and use. There’s an awful lot going on in the game, but you’re eased into it just slowly enough for it to make some sort of sense. There’s still an element of trial and error with the menus and upgrades, but I don’t think you can ever ruin things for yourself too badly if you mess up.

It’s surprisingly compulsive and oddly faithful to the source material – so much so that I found a health-restoring room by remembering where it was in the “real” castle. I’m only an hour and a half in, so I can’t speak for length or late-game difficulty, but I think it’s already been worth the three quid it cost me.

Hmm.

HMM.

I’m not sure about this. Maybe this is where there Castlevania meets diminishing returns. It seems to be half made up of changes I’m not sure I like (complicated glyph attack system, small level maps travelled to on a top-down, no-gameplay world map, more talking than normal) and the same old gameplay, but made a little bit harder by throwing a few too many enemies at you. (Including some highly annoying floating tentacled brain-suckers that don’t seem to have a name.)

That said, it’s Castlevania, so you can’t go very wrong. Maybe it’ll click at some point, maybe the level design will get more interesting – there have been far too many flat left-to-right trudges so far – and maybe the glyph system will seem less random.

Fingers crossed.

What do I think about it all? Well, the main game is very hard. It’s good, but it’s harder than any modern Castlevania and, I think, harder than Super Castlevania IV.

I’ve unlocked Symphony of the Night now, though, so I’m playing that instead. You unlock it in a really stupid way (you have to find a certain item on Level 3′ (not to be confused with Level 3) but I’ve done it now, so I can’t complain too much.

I’m probably being really stupid, but I just can’t tell what I’m meant to do.

I wasn’t enjoying it that much anyway. Any illness that can stop me enjoying Castlevania is evil. Evil!

(If you don’t know what “just as I remember it” means it translates to “one of the best games ever made”. The graphics aren’t as good as I remember and the endless GBA and DS versions mean it’s slightly over familiar, but it’s still wonderful.)

Well, The Creature did get me. About twenty times, until I trekked back to the shop and got some potions.

Now he’s dead.

It’s got to hard again now. I got one of Castlevania’s trademark fake endings, then worked out how to avoid stopping at that point. Now I’ve got to go through lots more paitnings, only this time their far too hard.

It doesn’t help that I made a terrible mistake and sold half the really good stuff I was wearing and I didn’t notice until after I saved. I’m stuck miles into one painting, short on cash and out of potions. It’s not fun.

I may pretend the bad ending was the real ending and leave this now.

I still hate Medusa Heads though. Oh yes I do.