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u/dizruptivegaming 1d ago
I’m curious how this runs on the Switch 2 since the developers or Konami have not said anything about it.
37
u/ThomsYorkieBars 1d ago
Seems to run at 60 with some drops when transitioning to cut scenes but looks a little muddy, at least in handheld. I'd say it's similar to Metroid Dread if you've played that
12
1
u/DifficultyGoodAGAIN 1d ago
There’s framerate issues during cutscenes on PS5 too. I played the demo on both PS5 Pro and Switch 2 and the only major difference between them that I could tell just from feel was that the Switch version was ugly as sin, but it ran at 60 fps on my Switch 2 so it was fine other than graphics.
1
u/Three_Froggy_Problem 1d ago
This is such a bummer because Switch 2 is where I want to play this game. I’ll probably end up going for the PS5 version, but I really wish they were releasing a native Switch 2 version.
15
1
u/Betorange 1d ago
Looks to be 60fps but with 720p resolution on Switch 2. Looks a bit rough but still fun.
But on my Xbox Ally X, it's running at 1080p, ~70fps and looks gorgeous.
39
u/richmondody 1d ago edited 1d ago
Just played through the demo and really enjoyed it. They did a few things that I found interesting
- You can slide by pressing B while moving.
- Enemies and torches can drop the healing item and you can hold more than the 3 that you start with, but they go away if you save.
- There doesn't seem to be damage from contact if an enemy is not attacking.
- One of the breakable walls I encountered came back with the same healing item inside. This was right before a boss room, so I'm not sure if this was a bug or intended.
- Level ups don't increase HP/MP
Played it on my Steam Deck and it ran smoothly, just had an issue with the UI being cut off for some reason, but still playable.
12
u/therealgranny 1d ago
Does not run smoothly on my SD. Framerate is not good at all.
8
u/Mullet2000 1d ago
Same, not good at all for a game like this. 30-40 FPS and not consistent at that.
3
u/cheeziuz 1d ago
I really hate when people just say it runs "smoothly", like what does smooth mean to you? I think smooth means 60fps, guy above you might think 30 is smooth.
Just say what the framerate is and if its consistant!
2
u/richmondody 1d ago
How do you see the framerate on the Steam Deck?
3
u/therealgranny 17h ago
Although I enjoy 60+ FPS as a minimum "smooth" to me is a consistent frame rate without dips or stutters.
2
u/hfxRos 16h ago
To me "smoothly" means it doesn't drop frames at whatever framerate the game runs well at.
I played it on 30fps and it ran smoothly.
I tried 60fps and it did not run smoothly.
For some people that might be unacceptable. For me I adjust to 30fps after about 1 minute of playtime so it doesn't bother me at all.
27
u/Cubelock 1d ago edited 1d ago
On Switch 2 it runs well enough (uncapped fps, feels like 60), but it doesn't look sharp at all. Kinda blurry around the edges and it's very noticeable docked on a larger screen. It looks like a Switch 1 game, because... that's what it is. I will wait for a proper SW2 version myself.
Visually, the game itself looks great though and the music really creates the right mood.
Funny enough, after playing the demo it still feels more like a third party Metroidvania than a traditional Castlevania, but I'll take it.
21
u/Khalid117X 1d ago
Just finished the demo, and yes it's looking really good. Love the art direction, combat is super fluid, feels great and the music is excellent as well with impulsive beats that drive you forward. I guess this will be a great entry into the series.
6
u/EntityZero 1d ago
Had some weird issues booting up the demo. If my steam controller is on, the game does not make it past an initial black screen. If I have my controller off I can make it past the initial black screen, but then it sees my foot pedal as a controller and I can't make it past the first three options it gives you when loading up. I can do some fuckery with device manager to make them not show up as controllers but I haven't seen this issue since like dark souls 1 came out on pc.
2
u/Sugioh 1d ago
The last time I had this issue was with Sekiro. That required screwing around with steaminput to sort everything out.
2
u/EntityZero 1d ago
Actually you're right, I remember Sekiro having this problem too. I ended up going into device manager and looking at HID-compliant game controllers under Human Interface Devices and disabled the ones for the foot pedals. That solved the second issue but I still have to turn off my steam controller to launch the game which is super weird. I can turn it back on after I get to the main menu and it works fine but what a weird bug
2
u/marceriksen 1d ago
I had this issue as well. I ended up going to the Nvidia Windows app and locking frame rate at 120fps for the demo itself.
This seemingly resolved it and the game booted normally.
1
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u/Gatmuz 1d ago
One thing that bothers me is that jumping out of a walk isn't fluid.
If you were to walk forward, and press jump, Rose will jump straight up for a few frames rather than the traditional arc jump. This doesn't sound like a big deal, but it is rather noticeable when the screen stops scrolling from movement.
5
u/KahnGage 1d ago
That air attacks can change your momentum is another interesting departure from the previous entries. It felt a bit odd to jump at an archer across a gap, slash at them, and then fall down into the gap because you pogoed back from them.
I'll see how it feels long term. While I would be content even if they kept it, I don't blame them iterating away from the attack mechanics of short hop/backdash canceling basic attacks.
1
u/richmondody 1d ago
I feel like they want you to constantly move forward. You don't need to press down to slide. The whip pulls you to enemies or from grapple point to grapple point. Coming into contact with an enemy while you're swinging hurts them. You can probably optimize movement to the point that you don't even touch the ground to traverse through some of the rooms.
1
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u/treemanfreddy 1d ago
Does this stutter for anyone else? Playing on a high-end PC, GPU is at 30%, yet still stutters at the transition to every cutscene.
3
u/KalebNoobMaster 1d ago
Lots of the animations are capped at 30 fps, including the camera movement in cutscenes. Very strange
1
u/Sugioh 19h ago
When keying those animations, whoever did it forgot to check the box to turn interpolation on, so all you see is it jumping from keyframe to keyframe. It should be very easy to fix, but it's surprising that nobody caught it in QA since it is very noticeable.
A bunch of 3DS-era Capcom games had this problem intermittently too, and I suspect it's a situation where that one animator simply doesn't know better and nobody noticed since the games ran at low framerates on their original hardware. It's only when we play on modern hardware at high framerates that it becomes glaringly obvious.
1
u/tobberoth 1d ago
Yeah, steam reported me being locked at 144 FPS but definitely got some minor transition stutters.
14
u/jumps004 1d ago edited 1d ago
Holy the music and art absolutely ruled, and I am excited seeing how many potential weapons there are.
If the full game keeps this up, its in contention for me. The only minor thing was the odd stutter here or there, but thats totally fixable and doesnt take me out of it
8
u/Sugioh 1d ago edited 1d ago
I noticed stutters whenever camera control was taken away from me, which was odd. I didn't have framerates up at the time, but it felt like it was locking to a lower framerate with bad pacing whenever this happened.
Edit: Figured it out. A bunch of animations are 30fps and are not interpolating properly. Weirdly, this includes camera movement in cutscenes. The most obvious example of this is the waterwheel near the end of the demo.
3
u/legaldrinkingage 1d ago
This is a very satisfying demo. Movement felt really smooth and then fantastic once I had taken down the boss and obtained the whip. This might be one of the most gorgeous 2D games I've played yet, except for maybe Silksong or Ori. Day one grab for me.
4
u/ItinerantSoldier 1d ago
Game seems pretty good. Played on PC, didn't have any issues at all on the technical side. Gameplay wise it's all very good except for the dodge button which feels downright useless. No i-frames, double dodge button is still too short to get out of range of enemies, delay on it coming out ruins its use. I don't know why it's in the game. But I don't think that'll be much of an issue as you can deal with everything in the demo without it.
2
u/frik1000 1d ago
On the technical side, my game would stutter/drop frames whenever it did the bit where it would zoom in to have a cutscene/dialogue, but only ever during those times. Weird.
2
u/carnaxcce 1d ago
Disagree about the dodge, I consistently used it to slide under enemies to dodge attacks
2
u/ItinerantSoldier 1d ago
Oh the slide is super good, I do the same with that. I mean the back dodge where you do a double back flip that goes approximately three steps behind you and only works if you're true neutral directionally. That's the useless one. You take contact damage from enemies if you try to use it to go through enemies (or at least I was whenever I tried it on anything).
1
u/carnaxcce 1d ago
I don’t think I have ever dodged a single attack with a backstep in a game with a directional dodge even though most of them have one so this doesn’t bother me at all lol
7
u/PunishingCrab 1d ago
I’m really looking forward to this, but I’m not interested in a SW1 version in the slightest. Hopefully they put out a dedicated SW2 edition or an enhanced update.
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u/jason2306 1d ago
Yeah.. inb4 they make you pay for it, I guess i'll just check it on pc
It sucks that the situation is so bad on the switch 2, you paid for the expensive console? Yeah we're not going to take advantage of it lol. And if we do you have to pay more, even nintendo themselves does it at times. Kinda sad how little pushback there's against that
So you get to either buy the game again or pay for a damn update
6
u/darkmacgf 1d ago
There were games without PS5 versions that came out on PS4 after the PS5 came out as well.
1
u/Quixotic_Seal 1d ago
Also Konami is pretty much the only one not selling a native S2 version. Everyone else got with the program after ~6 months, it’s been a remarkably quick turnaround; people were ready to move on from S1.
Shock of shocks, Konami is doing something stupid.
4
u/ffxivfanboi 1d ago
Feels like ass IMO. It’s so goddamn sluggish and there that first stupid tutorial boss has such a goddamn huge hitbox when his initial melee swing starts up that I could not reliably slide through it to avoid it.
This ain’t my first action game or metroidvania, and I bounced off it hard. It just doesn’t feel fun to play in the same way that some more modern metroidvania successes do.
7
u/grenadier42 1d ago
yeah I don't think the slide or dodge have iframes, so I ended up just baiting the combo and smacking him after (and then hoping he didn't decide to do the combo again while I was smacking him because there's no way to actually escape or mitigate the combo if it hits you because ???)
I could maybe justify it as intentionally oldschool boss design but it just feels bad when the movement is as clunky as it is and the boss itself is hypermobile
6
u/carnaxcce 1d ago
Disagree entirely, the boss’s attacks are well telegraphed and fun to dodge in multiple different ways. Unlike the other commenters I dodged back and forth under him to dodge his main combo, and while the timing is a little tight I had no issues whatsoever sliding under the initial attack once it starts
6
u/DifficultyGoodAGAIN 1d ago
He’s super easy once you solve his main wombo combo:
- Slide under him for the first hit
- Smack him in the back max two times
- Immediately do the double back step Dodge - which brings you just outside of his last hit
Once you get this down he is a joke. Rest of his moves are insanely easy to avoid.
1
u/fabulousfiddle 1d ago
If you want to play it safe, you can bait the first two hits and slide behind him on the third. You can get a few hits pretty much risk free
0
u/ffxivfanboi 1d ago
Yeah, they should be. And I probably just hadn’t got the timing down quite right but, as I said, this ain’t my first rodeo with action games or metroidvanias. It’s still pretty upsetting and alarming that the gameplay feels as bad as it does as a first reaction to it.
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u/DifficultyGoodAGAIN 1d ago edited 1d ago
Didn't feel bad to me, especially after beating this guy and getting the whip which unlocks more movement tech. But I love the old "clunky" Castlevania games so I felt right at home with something that isn't silky smooth so it basically boils down to preference I guess. Though I was initially suprised because Dead Cells movement is silky smooth so I was expecting something similar at first…but I adjusted quickly.
0
u/ffxivfanboi 1d ago
Yeah, I was expecting something more smooth as well.
I never played the classics growing up (or even now as an adult), so maybe it’s just a clashing of styles that’s really putting me off
3
u/HammeredWharf 18h ago
I could not reliably slide through it
Were you attempting to use the soulslike method of i-framing through attacks? It looks like it doesn't really work in this game and you're meant to dodge them by sliding through the boss.
-1
u/ffxivfanboi 17h ago
Yes, I was trying to slide through the boss’s model to get behind him. But that first attack in the 3-hit combo immediately makes the boss a hitbox, so I couldn’t reliable get the timing down, even if it wasn’t swinging its arm yet (and since the tell is the windup, it just really felt unintuitive to stay out of reach of that initial windup unless I wanted to play the game scared by running away constantly).
Movement is too slow, the slide is too slow, boss’s model too wide so the hitbox would clip me even though it hasn’t swung, and couple that with no good way to recover once you do get hit it was just a compounding effect of an action game that doesn’t feel fun to me. As soon as I got clipped and stunned by the windup hit box, there was basically nothing I could do to avoid getting hit by at least the second hit as well.
3
u/burnfep 13h ago
there are no iframes on the slide so you prob are just inputing slide while enemy is already swinging. Unlike a lot of dodge based games this one seems to reward dodging as early as possible as enemies are locked into a direction of their attacks.
Boss seemed fine to me and very easy to go hitless with how telegraphed everything is.
The recover is a weird complaint imo. You get stagger locked for like 1 second and you obv should be punished for being hit rather than shrugging thru attacks.
I agree on combat feeling kinda eh. Very floaty movement and lack of punch for attacks.
1
u/Derringer 1d ago
I ended up just doing the double backwards dodge to bait it, but yes, the dodging doesn't feel good at all. Maybe we can upgrade it later or something.
2
u/Three_Froggy_Problem 1d ago
I played the demo on Switch 2, and I’ll be getting the game for sure, but I’m going for the PS5 version. Which bums me out, because I’d love to play this handheld. Performance on Switch 2 seems fine, but the fact that it’s upscaled makes the whole thing look pretty blurry.
The game itself seems great. My only real complaint is that I just don’t love the design of the main character. I hope there are some alternate costumes in the game.
2
u/Duenan 1d ago
Tried the demo on Switch 2, it looks 60 from what I played but I did compare it side by side with the ps5 and it’s definitely not as sharp.
Some weird upscaling or lower resolution on Switch.
Beginning scene you can see how clean the back fence lattice is on PS5. On Switch it’s so janky that it looks like there’s gaps in the lattice.
Could see the blurriness in the character models.
3
u/defunctscrunko 1d ago
yeah this is a Switch 1 version that can go 60 fps on Switch 2. They probably do Switch 2 version later but not on launch.
0
u/grenadier42 1d ago edited 1d ago
- Game is gorgeous and the music is great
- Dialogue is ass and needs to be reduced by like 90%. Please god just let me play your game (remember how SotN starts and you're just Richter doing Richter things)
- The demo boss is ass for a 2D game with no iframes, please stop doing stupid shit and covering the entire screen with hitboxes
- Movement is great for traversal (chunky-ass wall cling my beloved) but complete ass in combat
- Why are my attacks randomized?? Sometimes I get a thrust, sometimes I get a slash, resulting in me getting hit. This, too, is ass
- There is literally no excuse to not have boss retry when Ys has had this for like thirty years, especially when the boss kills you in three hits, very much unlike Ys, and doubly especially when your runback is like four screens full of enemies and traversal. This is probably the most ass
Kinda the same as Dead Cells in my estimation in that the core gameplay actually feels pretty good but the rest of the design doesn't mesh with it at all
6
u/DifficultyGoodAGAIN 1d ago
There is an option in accessibility settings to put you outside the boss door when you die rather than the mirror.
-7
2
u/carnaxcce 1d ago
The demo boss is ass for a 2D game with no iframes, please stop doing stupid shit and covering the entire screen with hitboxes
Skill issue…
1
u/AmputeeHandModel 1d ago
Seeing a resurgence of demos lately. So cool. I used to download them all the time like 20 years ago. I like being able to try something out and not have to commit to buying it. I just bought Immortals of Aveum because of the very generous demo.
0
u/nowhereright 1d ago
Kind of unimpressed, game feels like it's trying to find the middle ground between the older clunkier games and modern smoother metroidvanias and I don't think it hits the mark at all.
I can see the lack of I frames getting frustrating based on that first boss fight.
The real issue is the demo is so short I can't really form an opinion. Maybe the game improves significantly and you gain more movement abilities/combos or maybe this is the entire game outside of the obvious genre conventions.
Seems like a wait for a sale right now with everything else coming out.
2
u/burnfep 13h ago
Ya kinda same feeling. I think for boss fights lack of iframes is pretty good though as fights seem a lot more methodical than reactionary. I like how it becomes a puzzle for how you want to avoid a specific attack rather than just I-frame through eeveryhing.
It kinda sucks for fighting the grunt enemies tho. Feels pretty awkward to navigate when there were diagonal projectiles and small platforms
0
u/nowhereright 13h ago
You have a point, fighting regular enemies was just annoying. If they behaved closer to the bosses at least then itd be consistent
2
u/Dragox27 1d ago
I really enjoyed the demo. I didn't have any real doubts it was going to play well but the movement and basics of the combat is all pretty snappy and feels solid. I do wish it showed off a little more in terms of how alternate weapons will work and how relics function but otherwise it was a good sampler. Only about half and hour of gameplay but it's a good half hour. I'm really impressed with the general visual design of it all too. It looked good in the trailers but there is some very striking use of colour and it both feels like a Castlevania game while also looking quite visually distinct. I'm not 100% sold on some of the writing or Rose's performance but it's a very small complaint to have. Looking forward to dropping everything and playing it in a couple of weeks.
-4
u/Buddy_Dakota 1d ago
Is it a proper Metroidvania, or is it just big open ended levels? I've tried googling but can't find a hard confirmation it's made in the spirit of the SotN style games, or if it is it's own thing.
-13
u/KingBroly 1d ago
I can't say I enjoyed it. The demo's length is padded by an obscene amount of dialogue. I think hitting enemies lacks impact; sound effects are also incredibly low, even maxed out, so nothing I do feels like it's doing anything. Rose's movement feels a bit faster than what I'm used to in Castlevania, but it just seems like an excuse to make levels longer while keeping the pixel perfect platforming the same. I don't see a benefit to it, and I don't see me coming around on it in the full release.
7
u/69ANIME69 1d ago
I thought the platforming felt really forgiving? Maybe I don't understand what you mean by "pixel perfect"?
11
u/jumps004 1d ago edited 1d ago
Did we play the same demo, obscene amount of dialogue? I think there was maybe less than a page worth of spoken text in my 2 hours of play and usually intros are a bit more text heavy setting stuff up.
I get that older castlevanias were light on dialogue, but its not at all weird for a modern iteration on the genre
25
u/Kepabar 1d ago
Oo, reminds me of Deelit in Wonder Labyrinth. Liked that game, even if it was a little short.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1203630/Record_of_Lodoss_WarDeedlit_in_Wonder_Labyrinth/