The Art of Castlevania Lords Of Shadow Review

Hey guys, I'm apologize for the lack of updates recently. It's been very busy but starting next week I'll finally have some more time on my hands :-). But, on to today's update which is a review of the artbook The Art of Castlevania Lords of Shadow. Again, the nice people from Titan Books were kind enough to provide a review copy so I can tell you guys about the awesome artwork that has been made for the game. So let's start with the introduction, which is probably the longest introduction I've seen in any artbook I currently own. Well, maybe except those from Warhammer 40,000, but that's mostly about the Emperor and his Primarchs, really cool, you should read up on that ;-). Anyway, this introduction tells the story of how Castlevania Lords of Shadow came to be. How the developer MercurySteam got to work on the IP, the ups and downs of its inception till the finished product. It takes about six pages to tell the story. Now the whole book consists of almost 200 pages and more than two third of it consists of character and monster art. So on that front, I'm a happy camper! It starts with lots of art of Gabriel Belmont and quite some accompanying text with background information such as character history and design decisions. Next up are the other Belmonts up to Simon, whom we all know from the original Castlevania. And after reading some of the accompanying text I must say, the family Belmont sure got the short end of the stick there. After all the designs of the Belmont clan, we're treated with some other character and monster designs. Quite a lot of them and all gorgeously dark and demonic. The last part of the book shows some of the environment concepts that was made for the game which, like the rest of the artwork, looks great and sets the proper tone of the game. One of the last pages showed some mechs though, not sure how they fitted in the game but the looked pretty cool. What I almost forgot to mention is that the book also contains a few storyboards of some of the scenes from the game. It's not something I see very often in video game artbooks but I think they should do it more often. All in all, if you're looking for some inspiration for dark, mean and or demonic looking characters, this book might just be the thing for you. Or if you just want some cool looking artwork to browse through. The introduction was quite interesting, although there will be people who'll just skip it since it's quite long, and since the artwork is of course the main thing here. The book is available through the website store or via Titan Books themselves. Enjoy, you're in for a treat! ;-)