Toziuha Night: Dracula’s Revenge is a Metroidvania that wears its inspirations proudly on its sleeve, not attempting to hide that the developer is a huge Castlevania fan. And that’s no bad thing in our eyes, so long as the game is up to scratch. So, we handed the game over to our App Army to see if it met their high standards.
Here’s what they said:
Jim Linford
I’m really enjoying this so far. Great throwback to NES Castlevania. I’m a bit rubbish with the touch controls and that has led me to fall into a few chasms. But most importantly this game has that just one more go hook to it. The story is “Uhh vampires” or something I’ve been too busy rushing through the cut scenes to get to the game.
Each time you get a game over the game helps you out with more candles or item drops. It just makes me want to push forward when I defeated my first boss I had a hell yeah moment. So while the game can be old school, the difficulty is also fair. I love the enemy variety. Still have the silly falling-down chasms due to the button placement and my trying to rush through levels.
If you have played classic Castlevania you know what to expect. The artwork is great. It comes across as mega drive levels for the cut scenes and in-level artwork. It’s a faithful recreation. Some nice parallax scrolling on some levels. Brings on the nostalgia for me. In-game graphics remind me of GBA games. The music is good but doesn’t really have a hook to it. Which is a shame as you can tell this is a real love letter to this genre.
A solid 8/10 garlic cloves.
I had a rough start with this cool 16-bit Castlevania throwback. After the kind of wordy intro, I got a look at the cool artwork including a very moody and creepy background. The problem was (as others have pointed out) that the touchscreen controls made those jumps too difficult. So lots of frustration there. LOTS of frustration there. But it supported my Backbone controller and that helped tremendously. Other than that I like the variety of monsters and terrain. Kind of funny to watch some of the monsters walk off into a pit, and I particularly enjoyed riding on top of the stage battling demons. The music was good though I turned it off early. That’s just a matter of preference really. Overall a fun experience but without a controller, it can be pretty frustrating. Thumbs up.
Chad Jones
Toziuha Night is a Castlevania-like game full of vampiric characters and great 16-bit graphics. The music works with the game but it’s not the memorable music of the classic Castlevania games. I would say everything works well in this game, especially if you’re a fan of the classics, except the touch controls. I found the touch controls infuriating, specifically the moment every time I would perform a jump the right stick and the jump button would not work together and I would always end up in a pit to my death.
I thought maybe it was playing on an iPad so I decided to try it on my son’s phone but it’s the same situation. There is something with the two buttons acting together that just doesn’t work well in this game and that’s where this game breaks. On a side note, I tried the Android version and the story and everything was very different but the controls were the same, same flaws and everything. I would really enjoy this game if it wasn’t for the controls or had optional controller support.
I’m loving this game, it’s like a true Castlevania spin-off or a clone of the original one… The atmosphere and gameplay are almost identical, even the bad guys seem like the sons of those in the NES old glorious trilogy. Anyway, for all Castlevania fans… go grab it!
Michael Purdy
This game is truly the game you have when you “have Castlevania already at home” The graphics, music, art style and gameplay are designed to evoke a classic Castlevania game, and it mostly succeeds. I will say that nothing in the game quite reaches the highs of its inspiration. While the graphics are nice looking, I am not as fond of the actual character designs. They are fine, just not to my taste. The music is good, but not as catchy as Castlevania’s best. It controls well on iPhone. I did install it on my iPad Air but found the controls too spread out to be comfortable on that screen. I plugged it into an external monitor to see if it was keyboard compatible out of curiosity but it was not. I didn’t get the chance to test connecting a controller.
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