Warlock (1994)

Beat. This game definitely has Castlevania and Metroid feel, but is far inferior. I went through most of the game using only healing potions and did not figure out what the other items did until late game, occasionally only using them for the invincibility frames. The potion was a small heal, the head was a complete heal, the skull kills basic enemies but does not seem to hurt tough ones, the lightning kills those invulnerable beholders but not sure if it hurts anything else, the quake sometimes reveals something or drops rocks on enemies, the triangle floats around you dealing damage and the sundial seems to reverse time a few seconds. My biggest problem with the game was the sluggish movement and control. I could not cancel animations to perform a different action, like stop a roll by attacking or stop an attack to jump away from an enemy. That damn roll was performed by pressing a direction and down, and I often rolled into an enemy when I wanted to crouch and shoot. I disliked not being able to shoot downwards without being in the air, and how slow the guy turns. Really, the controls and movements in this game try too hard to be realistic when they should have been like Super Metroid. I did like the secondary orb attack; it came in handy for hitting awkward angles, though it would have been awesome to have full control of the orb to fly it around wherever you wanted. In one level I found an upgrade for the basic attack that made it more powerful, but it did not carry over to the next level. This game needed some kind of power progression for the player. Some of the bosses had decent mechanics for ducking or dodging to avoid attacks, while others seemed like you just had to tank the damage or time item use for those I frames. I killed the final boss by standing next to him and using the triangle items. Too difficult to even bother trying to avoid damage. Only had to heal myself once.

I had a bit of trouble with platforming. Two times there was green stuff rising with a time limit to escape. One had a platform that needed to spawn and I could not figure out how to proceed. I'm not sure if trying quake made it spawn, or if the game did not feel like spawning it until that attempt. The second time I had to hit switches to trigger platforms, hit them again to make the platforms go up, and then shoot a block to move it out of the way so I could get purchase, which was a mechanic never before used in the game. While the levels had nice creepy themes, they tended to blur together with no sense of location. An overview map and more cohesive themes, like in the Castlevanias, would have been better. I did not enjoy the platforming, but it was not bad; more avoiding traps and pits than arbitrary floating platforms. Getting knocked around by enemies was annoying but the guy had enough hp to bull through traps and combat.

6.2/10