Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

40 to 100 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Just plain fun"

The time has come for a Castlevania title on the DS. The results is varying and good as bad reactions are dropping in. This is Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow (DoS).

Dawn of Sorrow is a sequel to the GBA game Aria of Sorrow where we follow the adventures of young Soma Cruz once again. This time, a cult seeking to revive Dracula´s powers is targeting Soma. Thanks to Soma´s resistance against his powers anyway, the cult leader Celia has chosen two men capable of becoming the new Dracula. It´s time for Soma to enter the Cult´s Nest and stop the coming dark forces.
That is the plot in a short and mixy way. I would gladly have seen a better plot, but this one works pretty well after all.

If you have played Aria of Sorrow to GBA, you will see there is nothing new to the battle system. Fight and collect souls for all your time´s worth. The game is a bit harder as well. This is big plus since Aria of Sorrow was too easy. I don´t know about you, but if I can clear a "long" game within 4 hours, it´s too easy. Luckily, that´s not the case here. The difficulty has been turned up a little and you will find some places and bosses harder than others.
A new feature Konami adds to the game is the Pentagram writing. After you "defeat" a boss, you will have to write a special pentagram on the touch screen to be able to kill the boss. I don´t want to say this is a good thing. It´s not bad either. Either you will love it or hate it. I hated it deeply mostly because you have to be pretty exact, you only have a short time to draw and if you fail, you will have to hit the boss like five-six times again.

Dawn of Sorrow is not a bad game and deserves the Castlevania title, but you will surely get mad at the easy parts of the game where it is supposed to be hard, but proves impossible (if you got that).