Castlevania: Curse of Darkness

Castlevania: Curse of Darkness is an action RPG set after the events of Dracula's Curse, in which the player takes on the role of demon forger Hector, who sets out to take revenge on his former comrade-in-arms Isaac for the death of his fiancée. The key feature of the game is the Innocent Devils system — Hector captures defeated demons and turns them into summonable companions who fight at his side, can be further upgraded, and whose abilities can be combined with the properties of Hector's weapons, giving the game more freedom in building your own combat style than earlier entries in the series. The combat system combines heavy and light attacks with combo chaining, and the game also emphasizes gathering materials from defeated enemies and processing them at the forge to craft new weapons and armor, moving away from the purely linear approach of the series' older 2D entries and edging closer to an action RPG with collecting and crafting elements that motivates the player to repeatedly farm specific enemies.

The Xbox version was released simultaneously with the PlayStation 2 release in 2005 and offers exactly the same content — the same castle environment and its surroundings, the same story and the complete Innocent Devils system with all demon types and their development branches, and the same number of playable levels and side quests. Thanks to more powerful hardware, the Xbox version was technically a bit cleaner, with less noticeable texture pop-in and slightly sharper graphics at a distance, but the gameplay, campaign length, and amount of side content remained unchanged, as did all the dialogue and cutscenes telling Hector's story. Anyone who could choose between the two consoles got a practically identical game on Xbox with a slightly improved technical side, not a different version of the content or a different pace of play, so the decision came down to which console the player already owned at home rather than any real differences between the two releases.

Why play it: Content-wise it's exactly the same game as on PlayStation 2, but the Xbox version offers somewhat cleaner graphics and less noticeable texture pop-in, making it a slightly better choice.