There were a lot of reasons that I was truly looking forward to reviewing Gal Guardians: Servants of the Dark. For one thing, I’m generally a pretty big fan of the work of Inti Creates. For another, I had enjoyed the first game, Demon Purge, and was hopeful that the sequel being a “full Metroidvania” would mean I enjoyed it even more. And just on the surface, it appeared to satisfy all my expectations.
Then, I got deeper into the game and discovered that it simply wasn’t what I was looking for. Despite a beautiful aesthetic, fun plot, and quirky characters, Gal Guardians: Servants of the Dark was an incredibly frustrating game that repeatedly went out of its way to make the exploration a painful slog instead of a satisfying progression. While I wouldn’t say it’s a must-avoid game, fans of the genre should read this review carefully to get an idea what to expect.
Whereas the first game focused on demon-hunting sisters Shinobu and Maya, this time around you play a pair of demonic maids (also sisters) named Kirika and Masha. Their goal? To bring their beloved master, the demon Lord Maxim Onslaught, back to life! That alone was unique enough to grab my interest, even though I quickly discovered this new pair shared a lot in common with their human predecessors.
Battle Maids to the Rescue
Kirika is the long-distance sister, firing a machine gun from afar or shotgun when up close (though, admittedly, I rarely was able to trigger the more powerful weapon). Masha, besides being the adorably quirky sister, also brings a powerful whip to the fray, which makes her great at close-up combat as well as mid-air combat. Additionally, she can make use of demon seeds to utilize powerful charge shots, which the game hints at but doesn’t really explain. Honestly, that’s probably where I should have recognized the warning signs, since Demon Purge did a much better job of thoroughly explaining the mechanics, and this sequel didn’t from the get go.
A Second Chance at Unlife
Also, like the last game here, if one sister gets downed, you can bring her back. But instead of CPR, you literally shove her soul back into her body, a mechanic that is also used when you find and bring back the lost souls of the other demonic staff of your master. He himself is a bit worse for wear after Lyzenorg shattered him into a thousand bony pieces. Luckily, his talking skull is still there to boss you around and lend a minimal fraction of his power when you recover set amounts of his missing skeleton.
This was a bit of a mixed bag. As you return bones and level up, besides getting small stat increases, you’ll also get new progression abilities like an aerial dash and mid-air jumps. After that, there are a lot of useless or poorly explained mechanics and abilities, such as Maxim’s supposed healing, which never triggered, a last-minute sister swap to recover health and avoid death that I found impossible to utilize, and additional sub-weapon loadouts. And inexplicably, many of the later upgrades are just additional mid-air jumps, which I was more than a little perplexed by.
On the topic of sub-weapons, that’s one of the areas this sequel annoyed me the most. In the last game, you got sub-weapons as rewards for beating bosses, a standard Metroidvania tradition. Here, instead, you find tons and tons of sub-weapons dropped by enemies. They range from daggers to roving spiders, living swords, and even explosives. Sounds great, right? Here’s the problem. For one thing, you have a limited amount of space in your inventory, and I quickly found so many sub-weapons that this filled up completely. For another, the game often doesn’t clearly tell you whether sub-weapons can be used to do things like break specific barriers in your path.
The other issue is that sub-weapons will randomly have special attributes, such as increasing Kirika’s ammo, resisting status ailments and even negative attributes like doubling the cost to use them. While you do eventually revive a helpful Mimic that will store additional items in his gullet, my inventory was still so cluttered with sub-weapons that I became overwhelmed. You can’t even sell them to the staff you rescue for coin, instead having to discard the inevitable bad variants or ones without any attributes.
I feel this was Inti Creates trying to iterate on the crafting mechanics in their last true Metroidvania, Yohane the Parhelion – Blaze in the Deepblue-. The problem is, that game did it much better. If there was a way to combine or tweak sub-weapons in Servants of the Dark, I probably would have enjoyed this more. Instead, I often forgot to use them at all, other than the torch that’s vital to traversing dark areas and the healing lantern.
Okay, We’re Officially Lost
As far as the exploration, that’s unfortunately another area that Servants of the Dark disappointed. Even though I don’t particularly like getting lost, the general hook of exploring a large area, beating a boss, and getting a new means to progress is a standard I’ve come to really adore in the Metroidvania genre. Here, you rarely get anything from beating a boss other than advancing the plot.
I also found the exploration itself clumsy and full of too many traps and endlessly spawning enemies. You’ll be walking around, minding your business, only to fall into a pitch-black hole full of foes. Or bouncing around on mushrooms only to get knocked down by a sudden giant bee into a bottomless pit. It’s a bit hard to quantify exactly what the game does wrong, but as someone who’s played and loved tons of Metroidvanias, I can attest the balance here is badly off. Worse, the platforming is noticeably less tight than most other games I’ve played from Inti Creates, including their Curse of the Moon adventures.
Then there’s the map, which isn’t all that helpful. I found myself really wanting a mini-map after Demon Purge, and though there is one here, it’s problematic. For one thing, it displays differently depending on whether you’re in Maxim’s castle or outside it. Worse, instead of clearly indicating how rooms are connected, there are lots of rooms connected in arbitrary ways that are confusing to parse. But the thing that most annoyed me was this. While you do have the capacity to warp back from any save room to Maxim’s castle or Throne Room, you can’t warp back afterward. Instead, you have to use waypoints manned by Karon, the boatwoman. Not only does this cost money, but often, these are out of the way.
Dune, The Director’s Cut
Burn in hell, Zuzu…
I was hoping the boss battles might inject some much-needed charm into proceedings, but to my great shock, this was a weak point as well. Which is especially surprising given how Inti Creates’ boss battles are often the highlight of their games. The first two bosses weren’t all that tough, but from the moment I faced off against Shinobu and Maya, I could tell the game was heading in the wrong direction. Not only did they have four to five times as much health as bosses up to that point, but they were also experts at pinning me down with gunfire and forcing me to jump into damage just to try and avoid the brunt of their attack combinations. Once I managed to beat them, they suddenly unleashed two back-to-back mega attacks, which annihilated me the first time around.
Not much later on, I faced off against a giant worm-ridden by the demon lord Zuzu. Though the worm by itself had been a manageable recurring mini-boss, the addition of the little demon lass made it nearly impossible. Together, they spat unbreakable spiked blocks that locked me out of moving freely while surging across the stage, bursting from the ground to attack, and even covering most of the screen with spreads of laser beams. I don’t mind a challenge, but I absolutely am offended by unfair and poorly balanced difficulty, which this game has in abundance.
Pretty Little Devils
Visually, Gal Guardians: Servants of the Dark lives up to the Inti Creates hype. It’s gorgeous, colorful, cartoony, and occasionally a little sexy for good measure. Many of the big bosses are female, ranging from evil maids to giant, voluptuous dragons and teeny, tiny Zuzu. The foes are much more eclectic, with sword-hurling skeletons, angry fire-spewing lanterns, gelatinous blobs, sneaky ghosts, and the ever-infuriating wyverns. Combined with the game’s talented voice acting and Gothic, jazzy tunes, you have a game that at least looks and sounds fantastic.
Much as I’d like to avoid it, I have more issues I need to discuss, all of which held the game back. Some are minor yet annoying things, like needing to hold the A button to confirm selections instead of just pressing it once. Then there are issues like being able to shift the map around from the pause screen but not from the mini-map you bring up. Or take how the game lets you put random icons on the map but not remove them. Then there are things like how half of the demon staff you rescue serve no gameplay purpose whatsoever.
On top of all that, the game just felt really poorly balanced. There was never anything close to a straight path from point A to B, instead forcing players on incredibly convoluted meanderings that as often led to dead ends as it did progression to the next big objective. Most frustrating, though, was what I had already been hinting at: the game’s poor balance and sloppy platforming. I can live with one or the other being off in a Metroidvania, but having both deals a nearly fatal blow to a game already reeling on the edge of death.
Stake Through the Heart
I really wanted to love Gal Guardians: Servants of the Dark. I kept giving it more and more time to prove itself and get past the sophomoric slump I kept finding myself in. But alas, this is not the sequel I was hoping for or expecting after Gal Guardians: Demon Purge. This would be one thing from some new upstart developer, but it’s truly surprising and disappointing from the talented folks at Inti Creates. That said, if you can tolerate bad platforming, poorly managed mechanics, and frustrating balance, then you might still find something to love here. For everyone else, this isn’t the adventure for you.
Final Verdict: 2.5/5
Available on: PC (reviewed), Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Series X|S; Publisher: Inti Creates; Developer: Inti Creates; Players: 1-2; Released: March 26, 2025; MSRP: $29.99
Editor’s note: The publisher provided a review copy to Hey Poor Player.
