Soul of Darkness Review

If you somehow managed to skip past the title screen on this one and just started playing a few minutes into the adventure, you'd swear you were playing a Castlevania game. Gameloft's managed to craft an excellent homage to the series here, as Soul of Darkness looks, sounds and plays exactly like one of Konami's 2D vampire-hunting adventures. It's not very original, but it's not supposed to be -- it's intended to be a clone, and it does that job very, very well.

Having, essentially, a new portable Castlevania experience to download for just five bucks should already be enough to convince fans of that franchise to make a purchase, but then Soul of Darkness does get some added support from its Gameloft heritage as well -- by including some bonus features drawn from past DSiWare releases from that company.

You'll come across special photo-taking tents in the middle of several levels, and going inside you can snap a picture with the DSi camera to earn a power-up -- we first saw that idea in the DSiWare version of Castle of Magic.

You'll earn glowing spirit orbs from defeated foes, and you can then use them to level up your weapons in a pause menu -- adding extra damage or extended combo abilities to them. We first saw that in Hero of Sparta.

And, of course, you can take a picture of your own face and swap it in to replace the main character's during cut scenes. That feature's been in nearly every Gameloft DSi product.