Castlevania (Europe) (En,Fr,De) ROM

Overall Castlevania 64 is a hopelessly mediocre game. Controls are imprecise and the character slides after stopping from some reason like he's running on ice. For these reasons it's hard to manage the heavy platforming and moving on narrow pathways. Camera doesn't help a bit here - it makes it all worse. I have a hard time understanding how it's even possible to actually try to make a working camera and end up with something like this. It jumps here and there and at times when it's most crucial to place it behind the character, it just doesn't work. Often the camera is also too close to the character making it impossible to see a bigger picture of the situation.
Level design is simply boring structurally as well as artistically. It gets better in some areas (Tower of Execution comes to mind as a somewhat atmospheric location) but mostly it's just grey walls and too much flat surfaces populated with uninteresting and repetitive enemies. Enemy design is pretty decent I suppose but the battle mechanics are so shallow that fighting quickly becomes repetitive and boring. Player must often travel through same rooms many times and the same enemies always appear. Sometimes they must be defeated to open a door forcing the player to slay them over and over again. Technically the graphics are nothing special - pretty mediocre stuff.
Musically Castlevania 64 is nowhere near the classic 2D games of the series but it's not downright crappy either. Basically it's just pretty uninteresting and negligible.
One thing I give props to the developers for is that they took inspiration from the 2D games and built some levels with lots of hard platforming with a sense of scale and height. This is something that was neglegted in the later 3D games. But Konami could have made it a lot better by integrating fighting and platforming properly. There are some situations resembling this but they are few and far between.
The best reason to try this game out are the occasional hints of a classic 2D Castlevania transformed into 3D even if it's a very incomplete effort.

Also known as Akumajou Dracula Mokushiroku - Real Action Adventure.