I didn't finish Lords of Shadow, so this won't be a review. From what I did play, I have to wonder who the developers had in mind here. Fans of the Castlevania series won't find much that reminds them of past games, outside of the main character's name. The story isn't interesting enough to draw you in, and Patrick Stewart's overly dramatic voice acting between chapters is way too cheesy to be taken seriously. Everything in the game has been taken from older, better games. And it costs $60.

Begin the complaints!

The main character, whose name is Gabriel (because that's what people in games like this are named), has a cross that operates like the Blades of Chaos from God of War. Yes, Dante's Inferno also ripped the combat from God of War pretty blatantly, but that game felt more satisfying and had some great cut scenes and themes from a classic piece of literature. No such luck here.

Gabriel has a move that allows you to dodge attacks, but of course it's not mapped to the right thumb stick, because that would make too much sense. The right thumbstick, in fact, does nothing because the camera is locked down.

Sound frustrating? Welcome to Lords of Shadow. The camera never seems to be pointed where you want to see, and getting around the linear levels is more of a pain than it needs to be. The right trigger does whatever contextual things needs to be done, which means in sections where there are multiple contextual actions it does whatever you don't want it to do.

I also enjoyed how, after dying, the game asked if I wanted to continue from the last checkpoint, and the game put the cursor on "no" as a default. I felt like I was doing something wrong when I continued to play the game.

In one scene, I swung over a wall (on accident, of course) and then found I couldn't get back to where I came from to collect an important item. I finally restarted the entire level and slogged through it again. Hey, at least I found new green glowy things from the bodies of dead knights. These are hidden around each level, and if you collect enough of them, your total health goes up. You regain health from fountains. I didn't think it was possible to steal so much from a single game without adding anything new of worth until I fought my first Colossus.

The big hulking enemy came out of the ice, and to fight him I had to climb up his body and stab a rune. There's a button to hang on when the Colossus, or Titan, or (as I called him) "Plagiarism" tried to shake me off. Even when I held that button, I would sometimes fall off and have to start again. This is what happens when someone plays Shadow of the Colossus and asks what it would be like if all the joy were sucked out of it.

Was there at least a naked fairy?

I did get to see a naked fairy pretty quickly, so that was cool. I'm told if you keep playing, the final third has some things that vaguely remind you of previous Castlevania games, but if you got that far and no one was paying you to play the game, you deserve a medal, not some classic enemies.

I also can't leave out the mind-numbing "logic puzzles" that the game throws at you, because the game's pace isn't slow enough with all the yapping from Captain Picard and the long cut scenes. I mean, if a game is going to throw a talking horse at you, it should happen well into the experience. But no, here you get a glowing, talking horse right off the bat. The main character doesn't question this, because things can't possibly get any stupider, right? At least until you're aiming light with mirrors in a puzzle and you wonder if you're playing a game from the PlayStation era. (You just know there was a rejected co-op mode where you both had to stand on triggers at the same time.)

Every scene seemed to say, "Remember the game that this came from, and how much fun it was? Screw you!" I'm told that things really pick up ten hours in, which means you suffer through an entire good game's worth of a bad game to get to something that might be mediocre. In ten hours I could read a good book or watch ten of my son's soccer games.

Sixty dollars is a lot of money, and time is something you can't buy at any price. Why not do something enjoyable? Lords of Shadow offers you boring gameplay with a side dish of uninspired story. I don't care if you have the budget of a Trump combined with the life expectancy of a MacLeod, there are better things for you to do with your time and money.

Lords of Shadow is just bland, a mishmash of warmed over ideas that adds up to less than the sum of their parts. It's not terrible, but that would almost be preferable. Yes, this sounds whiny, but life is too short for games that aren't fun. Right now I'm playing more involving games, I'm halfway through a good book, and I hear there was a lesbian scene in last night's episode of Glee. All of those things are preferable.

P.S.: The framerate on the 360 version is bad.