devonrv

Well, this one was disappointing.

  • Cursed Castilla (Maldita Castilla EX)

    2 hours playtime

    2 of 16 achievements

This is a platformer. You’ve got horizontal movement, a jump, and a ranged attack which can be aimed left, right, or up (or down if you’re in mid-jump). Levels contain chests scattered throughout them (I don’t think any are hidden; they’re all out in the open), and some of these chests will contain a weapon emblem; if you wait, it cycles through all the possible weapons, and collecting it will replace your current weapon with the one shown. You can also find secondary items that likewise replace your current secondary item (if you have one), but these are in fixed positions and won’t cycle between each other.

The game is clearly modeled after old-school platformers, for better or worse. On one hand, it doesn’t try to add hack ‘n’ slash elements that completely defeat the point of platformers, nor does it think that giving the player new equipment without changing up anything else results in “variety,” and the best part: it has actual level design! Yay!

On the other hand, the game just doesn’t seem to be thought through very well. The platforming is never too complex, usually being limited to gaps in long, flat floors or a large pit with a bunch of moving platforms, so to add challenge, the game has enemies throw projectiles at you, sometimes quite a bit of projectiles, sometimes bouncing projectiles, sometimes guided projectiles, etc. That wouldn’t be so bad if the mechanics allowed for precise movement, but the jump mechanic is only one step above Castlevania 1 jumps: while your horizontal speed isn’t set in stone the moment you hit the jump button, you can only alter your speed slightly (especially if you jump straight up), so it isn’t uncommon to dodge one projectile only for another one to hit you before you can do anything. On top of this, you have knockback on damage, and you don’t regain control until after you land on solid ground, which only serves to exacerbate the previous problems by having cheap hits knock you into instant-death spikes or pits. What’s worse is that the game also only lets you have two of your own projectiles on screen at any given time (or one projectile if you have the three-way shot), and it can take a second for them to leave the screen (come on, even Mega Man let us have three shots!), so even though enemies are shooting a bunch of their own shots at you, you need to be careful because missing could very well get you killed really fast. It honestly doesn’t feel like the mechanics were designed around the rest of the game.

Even with better mechanics, the game would still have a few issues. Here are three specific places I’ll highlight as having bad level design. The first is the turtle bridge in stage 4. It’s a long lake with turtles coming from the right to the left, and if you fall in the water, you die. Also, there are floating spike-balls over the lake you need to jump around. Okay, that’s fine, but once you get one screen’s length into the area, the turtles stop spawning from the side of the screen and instead come up from the lake, meaning you now have to wait for them to appear while slowly being moved backward by the turtle you’re on. This spot also just so happens to be right after you jump past the first spike ball, so while you wait on the turtle, you’re being moved back to the hazard you just passed (perhaps even barely given the game’s mechanics), and you can’t anticipate where the turtle will be since it could be right by you or one turtle’s length away. This is also the place where you find out that if you just barely make a jump, you’ll land on the platform only to fall off anyway, as if the player’s jumping sprite and standing sprite have different hit-boxes.

The second is the worm boss in stage 5. First of all, it starts off off-screen, so you might think you just have to keep going forward until you find it, except it turns out it was behind you the whole time and you were supposed to kill it before it reaches the end. Second, it only shows its weak point every so often, and this, combined with all the enemies scattered throughout the hall, means you only barely have enough time to kill it, and only if you abuse the fact that you can attack quicker when closer to your target (remember you can only have two shots on screen at once!).

The last one is the last part of stage 7. Not only is there a Forest Maze segment where you have to go the correct way to proceed, not only do you have to deal with guided projectiles with only the game’s outdated mechanics to see you through, not only do you need to get a key from one room and make it past the next room unscathed to unlock the way forward (lest you be forced back to the beginning of this segment again because dying starts you after the key, but doesn’t let you keep the key, and you need that key to progress), but after that is a downward vertical section filled with more guided projectiles and instant-kill spikes. You have to climb down chains to progress and avoid the spikes, but you have to kill the projectiles before they knock you into said spikes, but you can’t attack while holding on a chain (nor can you simply let go), so you have to jump between them and aim downward, but you grab the chains automatically and there’s only so much room until you reach the ceiling and don’t forget about how the jumping mechanic works (in other words, you kinda have to hit them on your first or second jump before you get hit into the spikes and die). Honestly, the boss of this level is super easy in comparison (I beat both phases on my first try).

On a side note, you can unlock a post-game level (stage 8) if you find five blue squares. However, if you beat the game without getting all of them, you have to start over from the beginning if you want to try for it; no stage select or indication of which levels have the ones you missed or anything that would let you get right to the point. Plus, two of them are hidden in BS ways anyway (one of which is the first one, and since the game makes no indication that they even exist until after you find and collect one, that’s a pretty clear case of the artificial-replayability that plagued many old-school games like Mr. Gimmick).

Plus, the game is really short. Kero Blaster has a better content-to-price ratio, for crying out loud (20 extra minutes for two dollars cheaper)!

So yeah, I don’t think I’d recommend this game. While I do prefer the general idea and design philosophy of old-school platfomers, this one went too old-school and ended up with quite a few issues that should have been ironed out by the 90s. If you’re still interested, check out it’s free version, simply called “Maldita Castilla” (without the “EX”); heck, the free version might be better since it apparently doesn’t have that near-perfection-demanding worm boss.