Alternate Title: This game is also listed on XBLA as "Castlevania HD"
Castlevania has traditionally been a single-player affair, using either a small number of very difficult stages and classic 2D platforming mechanics or letting you explore a huge continuous map, thus becoming half of the ’Metroidvania’ genre’s namesake. Harmony of Despair meets these ideas somewhere in the middle, giving you six pretty big stages to play through and adding six player co-op. While not very satisfying as a single-player game, working together with friends to find loot, solve basic puzzles, and defeat huge bosses is fun.
Mostly built from resources used in the various DS Castlevania games, Harmony of Despair is ’HD’ in the sense that that each stage occupies the full 1080p display when zoomed out. This view lets you easily see where the boss and important items are so you can plan your route, then you can zoom in to handle the actual maneuvering and fighting. You have thirty minutes to go through any given stage, which is usually just barely enough on a first run through and becomes increasingly generous on any repeat plays since very little changes or randomizes whenever you go through a stage again.
While Harmony of Despair can technically be played alone, that gets boring very quickly; many bosses are hard to kill without at least one other player stopping the boss’ gimmicks while someone else focuses on doing damage. Both the stages and bosses were built with co-op play in mind, and it becomes much more enjoyable when you have friends. To the game’s credit, loot is automatically shared; if one person dashes off ahead to open a treasure chest, each player gets a single random item from it so you don’t have to worry about someone being greedy. Powerful ’Dual Crush’ attacks and the ability to heal or revive allies also encourages cooperation, so aside from spamming voice-menu commands there is little ’griefing’ one can do.
Co-op is the heart of this game, though given the way the camera works you can only do online co-op. Your experience and controls will almost always be smooth, though how you see the actions of other players is going to vary wildly based on their connection. Sometimes they move just as smoothly as you do, making it seem like you’re playing locally with them... while in other times they will ’warp’ around as your end of the game receives late updates about what other players are doing; one moment you see them fall down a hole, then the next they re-appear in mid-jump, actually having never missed the jump to begin with. This would be a serious problem in a competitive game, but for a co-op experience like this it isn’t too bad and when the game does run with no major lag it works just fine.
The end result is that Harmony of Despair is a terrible single-player game, but online play can favorably be called something like "Metroidvania the Loot-Gathering Speedrun: Co-Op Edition." It’s enjoyable if you go in expecting that, and so long as you have people to play with Harmony of Despair can justify its $15/1200 Microsoft Point price.
