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In early 2023, developer Inti Creates, known for their retro-styled games like the Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon series, decided to adapt their cheeky and cutesy Gal*Gun rail shooter series into a new spinoff called Gal Guardians. The gameplay was an homage to Castlevania: Rondo of Blood, and resulted in the awesome Gal Guardians: Demon Purge.
Last year, it was announced that a sequel was on the way, titled Servants of the Dark, which would feature two new main characters as well as more of a focus on the style of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, rather than sticking with the Rondo homage found in Demon Purge. Now we’ve had a chance to fully check out Servants to assess how it stacks up with its inspirations and its predecessor in the somewhat over-saturated modern market of Metroidvania games.
Servants starts out with it’s SOTN influences on its sleeve, with a bigger, more interconnected world map replacing the separate stages seen in Demon Purge, but most other elements of the gameplay here feel very similar to the first game, despite technically having different main characters. The real-time character switching makes it feel a little closer to the later Nintendo DS Castlevania games as well, rounding out a general homage to the later 2D games from the series.
This time, each character is stuck with one weapon each, with Kirika having the long-range machine gun and Masha being the traditional whip-wielding character, for short-range combat. Two sub-weapons are swappable for each character, and each character has certain exclusive sub-weapon types they only they can equip, and later on, some of these sub-weapons will be used to unlock new areas.
You’ll also have your support character following you the whole game, who has a few abilities of his own, like healing, allowing special abilities, or strengthening your attacks when needed. They also have the ability to equip special tokens that grant abilities or stat boosts for the main characters.
The character and monster designs here are fun and colorful, but the monster designs do suffer from a bit of a lack of variety in general. Having said that, this was also a factor in many of the actual Castlevania games, so it may not be too big of a deal for many players.
The game’s UI and overall design are where some cracks start to form in what initially felt like a very solid homage. While visually very attractive on the surface, the general progression and content of the game suffers for a variety of reasons.
The UI and tutorials, which are supposed to give you useful information to be able to progress through the game and unlock new areas, are often missing vital information, including a total lack of control instructions for all of the various abilities you can perform. Some of them are very complex button combinations of around three or four buttons at a time, making it nearly impossible to figure them out on your own.
Since some of these abilities are required to access new areas of the game, this is a major oversight that significantly harms the game. I’ve notified the developers on this and was assured that this will be fixed in patches, but in its current state, this is nearly game-breaking.
The navigation UI and map are also lacking in some major ways, even though it does have some nice quality of life elements like fairly clearly marking when you’ve fully explored a certain room or not and letting you also set your own custom markers. However, in general, the game gives you very little direction as to which area you’re supposed to be accessing next or how to get there.
Sometimes there’s some vague dialogue in between areas that will tell you to head in a certain direction, but sometimes not. Even though a vague objective marker does appear on the map for your current objective, you’re often sent on sub-quests to find other things before being able to tackle your main objective, yet the marker does not move for those. This leads to some very confusing progression at certain points and can kill the pacing of the game when it’s unclear what you’re supposed to be doing. I’ve also notified the developers that this should be worked on, but it’s doubtful this will be fixed very soon.
The game is also relatively easy. I rarely ever felt real challenge in the combat on the normal difficulty, which may be a bit of a downside for many looking for a challenge. Thankfully you can choose to do your first playthrough on the hard difficulty if you are looking for that challenge, but it indicates a general low level of difficulty compared to many of the classics the game is paying homage to.
On top of the difficulty not being too much to sink your teeth into, the game also feels pretty light on content in general. The lack of direction on how to progress or where to find things feels like a crutch to pad out your play time in ways that don’t feel natural or compelling to play. Lots of backtracking and directionless sub-quests make the progression feel cheap and unexciting, and left me feeling a bit empty by the time I reached the end.
There’s also a major issue in the control department, since the game expects you to use a modern controller with two analog sticks and a d-pad, and yet it forces you to use the analog stick for movement, which tends to be a pretty bad idea for 2D games. There’s no option to switch to the d-pad for more precise movement, as the d-pad is already designated for sub-weapon switching, making for a pretty bad time unless you have a specialized controller that can swap them for you.
As far as options and customization, things are also quite limited, even on the PC version, as there’s generally no customization for controls or visual options, with only two display resolutions available and no deeper options on visual fidelity. This might be updated later, but for now, many players who want to tweak or customize the game for their hardware setup will be disappointed here.
Overall, this package was a pretty big disappointment for several reasons across the board, and one that I hope they can later improve with patches. However, in its current state, there’s a lot left unsatisfied and it makes for an experience that feels lacking in several very important ways. I am open to updating this review once some fixes are made, if they’re made in a timely manner, but I can only critique the game that exists right now.
It’s a shame this didn’t live up to or expand on what Demon Purge was able to accomplish in so many ways, and I’m hoping it’s salvageable at some point, but even if it was “fixed”, it would still feel fairly mediocre. In a genre where the bar has been raised in recent years with titles like Ender Lilies, a Metroidvania game that’s just average doesn’t cut it anymore.
Even though the moment-to-moment gameplay can be fun and it checks all the basic boxes for your average game in this genre, it’s hard to recommend it in the state it’s in right now. Even for the relatively low price tag, I would only risk buying it if you’re a die-hard Gal*Gun fan or just very desperate for a new anime Metroidvania game.
(5.5 / 10)
Average
(5.5 / 10)Rely on Horror Review Score Guide
A review code for PC was provided by the developer.
