Parent's Guide: Castlevania: Lords of Shadow - Mirror of Fate - Age rating, mature content and difficulty

Set in the Gothic confines of Dracula's castle, Castlevania: Lords of Shadows - Mirror of Fate is a side-scrolling platformer-come-adventure game that offers a surprising amount of freedom.

The objective here is to navigate Dracula's inner sanctum, solving all variety of rudimentary puzzles as you go. As you may expect, the castle isn't the most ergonomically designed of places, with even getting from A to B being quite the challenge. Often you'll be able to see where you have to go, but you're not quite sure how to get there, and whether you're leaping from ledge to ledge, swinging from the roof by way of your whip, or turning into mist to slide through a locked door, finding your way around the castle is part of the fun.

You'll certainly need a logical mind in order to find your way around Dracula's castle - but it's the combat that'll cause the most problems. Castlevania games have a reputation for being incredibly hard, this is no different. While there is an adjustable difficulty level, it's hidden away in the options menu, with no attention ever drawn to it - choose to start a new game, and you'll be dropping in on normal, where enemies can defeat you in only a few hits. Turning the difficulty down does help, but Castlevania is still a rather challenging game, as even on easy, your character won't be able to take more than a few hits before popping his clogs.

Castlevania is a game that contains fairly gracious helpings of violence and gore, along with several references to sex, although happily, it is free of any bad language.

Early in a game, a zombie will stumble towards you with an axe in his head. In a cutscene, your characters grabs the axe, and kicks the body, which leaves your character holding an axe with a zombie's head attached. Attacking zombies often causes them to break up into pieces (arms, legs, head, torso), with spurts of blood. Later in the game, a boss fight sees you pressing button in a cutscene in order to cut a large, muscular enemy's arms off mid-way, leaving a red raw wound which looks not too dissimilar to a joint of ham, before tearing the enemy in half altogether. It's not as violent as games like God of War, though, as once the enemy's been chopped in half, there are no guts hanging out, or similarly stomach churning scenes.

Meanwhile, around halfway through the game, a cutscene will see your character propositioned by scantily clad succubi with barely covered breasts. Whilst engaged in what could be construed as a lesbian embrace, the two succubi caress each other while inviting the player to join them - "You missed out on so much pleasure". They then lean in as though they're going to kiss, only for one to effectively suck the life out of the other. It's all very strange.

Age Ratings

Format Reviewed: Nintendo 3DS