Castle of Magic (Video Game Review)

Video Game Review
Castle of Magic
DSiWare
2009
Developed by: Gameloft
Published by: Gameloft

The DSiWare service has been home to many cheap titles offering simple thrills ever since the service started in 2009. Every so often among the weekly releases a title comes forward that rivals full retail games in the amount of content in their package and also in the amount of gameplay offered. Gameloft’s Castle of Magic is not one of those titles. While it tries to be a steal-of-a-deal game, it falls flat. The gameplay is mediocre but some of the games mechanics are broken. It’s an appropriate game for its price point but that’s not saying much for a game priced at five bucks.

While exploring around their home, Wizzy and Jenny come across a treasure chest. When they open it up, they’re taken to the world of an evil magician named Nesfastax. Nesfastax kidnaps Jenny and forces Wizzy to traverse through all five of the wizard’s realms and defeat all of Nesfastax’s minions or Wizzy will never see Jenny again. Wizzy himself is transformed into a junior magician and is able to harness several magical powers to use on his quest to rescue Jenny and find their way home.

The controls are reasonably set up. The d-pad moves Wizzy around while one button makes him jump and the other button shoots off a projectile (the type of projectile depends on the power-up that Wizzy possesses at that moment). Hitting the jump button twice allows for a double jump while holding down on the jump button while in the air allows Wizzy to glide gracefully down. The controls have their issues in that the jump mechanics can be troublesome at times but considering the modest amount of actions available in the game, the control scheme gets the job done.

The graphics look fine for a DS title. They don’t come close to touching New Super Mario Bros. but they are not an embarrassment either. Everything looks colourful and "enchanted" to give it an aesthetic look that’s pleasing to kids. There are a couple of minor issues with the camera (which shouldn’t ever happen with a 2D platformer). However, the visuals are good enough to satisfy most players.

The sound is a mixed bag. The music isn’t bad although it wasn’t my cup of tea. The sound effects were annoying though. There have been better sound effects created by digital watches from the 1970s.

It’s not that the game was bad but it felt pointless. There was little difficulty as it was very simple to breeze through levels. It didn’t help that extra lives were very easy to get. The lack of difficulty eventually gets to you but you’ll want to finish the game only because the ending feels very close (there are only 25 levels including boss fights). That’s the only motivation to finish the game which is never a good thing. At least the boss fights were interesting and creative. It was the only thing to look forward to after growing through a couple of boring levels.

However, there are some major issues with how the game works. The major gimmick of the game is that you can enter photo booths in a level and you can receive power-ups by taking a picture with the DSi camera. The power-up you receive is based on the amount of a particular colour that is in the picture (either blue, green, or red). There are two major problems with this. The first is that it doesn’t work properly. I had to take a picture of something green so I could receive the power-up I wanted. I took a picture of the cover of a green binder in a well-lit room. The game came back and told me that it didn’t analyze enough green in the picture, so I didn’t receive any power-up. On screen, it showed a giant green square but it came back saying it was less than 20% green. It kills the whole gimmick. The second problem is that it’s not something you can do if you’re out in public; especially if you’re taking mass transit. It’s hard enough taking a picture of a specific colour on the subway but you look like a weirdo by taking pictures with your DSi for no real reason. People can get arrested for that.

However, the game is so easy, the broken camera functionality doesn’t kill the game. It just takes away from it being a special experience. What kills the game is finicky platforming controls. Jumping onto the proper platform can be a chore at times. It gets to the point where controlling the game is more difficult than the levels themselves.

Castle of Magic isn’t all bad but it’s not far from it. It had some potential and you could tell that Gameloft really had an idea of what they wanted to do with the game and distinguish it from the rest of the other platformers on the DS. It’s not wretched enough that you need to avoid this game at all costs but there are plenty of other titles on the DS (both retail and downloadable) that are much more worthwhile. If you have gone through all the other platformers on the system, it wouldn’t hurt to give this one a try but the experience won’t last long and it won’t feel worthwhile.

☆☆