You crack a whip and platform your way through eight classic vampire-hunting games from across the series' history, starting with the original NES entry. Levels are built around tight jumps and enemy placement that demands memorization more than reflexes. It is a good way to see how one long-running series changed over the years, with a digital art book included for extra history.
Gameplay video
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Screenshots & review notes
Overall
This is a solid, no-frills trip through the series' history, though it stops short of including some of the true classics fans might expect.
Moment to moment
Whip-cracking platforming holds up well across most entries, with stiff but deliberate controls that reward memorization over reflexes.
Art and atmosphere
Presentation is simple and functional, with a bonus art book adding some nice context, though there is little in the way of modern polish.
Worth your time?
Best suited to genre historians and longtime fans rather than newcomers looking for an easy entry point. Solid value for the asking price.
Frames captured from the gameplay video above; notes are our own take on the game.
What it's like to play
You get eight classic Castlevania games from the NES and Game Boy eras bundled together, and most of them put you in control of a vampire hunter walking, jumping, and cracking a whip through gothic, monster-filled castles, with jumps that commit fully once you leave the ground, no changing direction mid-air like in many other platformers. The original NES Castlevania in particular is famous for this deliberate, unforgiving style of platforming, where every jump over a pit or past a candle-thrown axe has to be planned before you commit to it. Later entries in the set, like Super Castlevania IV, loosen this up and let you whip in eight directions and control your jumps more freely, showing how much the series evolved even within these older games.
Your goal in any of these games is the classic one, fight through a series of stages populated with classic monster movie enemies, collect hearts to use as ammo for sub-weapons like throwing knives or holy water, and defeat a boss at the end of each stage before eventually reaching Dracula himself. A charming oddball inclusion is Kid Dracula, a much lighter, cartoonish spin-off that plays very differently from the main series' grim tone. Each individual game here can be finished in a few hours, though mastering the tighter ones takes real practice.
Session to session this feels like a history lesson you play rather than read, and a genuine test of patience and memorization on the harder titles. What may frustrate you is that a couple of the Game Boy entries are rough by any standard, and one game in particular is notorious for cryptic, unclear progression that basically requires a guide. This is best suited to retro action fans who want to understand where the series came from and do not mind old-school difficulty along the way.