Lords of shadow 2 met with poor reception due to an absence of a few elements as well as a muted ending, in a similar vein to mass effect 3's reception where the ride was more enjoyable than the result, which literally placed you back where you start.
that said the combat system was quite gratifying and enjoyable, as was the presentation.
from riding god's personal autobot and killing his champion to generating nuclear blasts generated from raw blasphemy as well as riding rockets, slaughtering the most powerful demons in the universe, making death himself his person revenge punching bag and being far too powerful for any belmont to canonically handle at his full power, the lords incarnation of dracula is everything that the classic dracula wanted to be but never could become, superior in all aspects but one.
his heroic nature.
unlike classic dracula, who only developed a hate-filled attitude toward humanity due to them killing his wife for witchcraft, the lords dracula was a hero who had everything taken from him, including his humanity, and later he would be cruelly tricked by fate itself into killing his own son and turning him into a vampire post-mortem.
lords dracula is ironically a heroic evolution of classic dracula, everything is there, but for a heroic or sympathetic reason.
his vampirism? he let himself be willingly turned to save the world from destruction.
his mastery over all monsters and creatures of the night?
he gained their respect by defeating the first two lords who ruled over them, the undead he manipulated through his own personal use of necromancy learned from his trip to zobek's domain.
his hatred of humanity?
Madness from his vampirism coupled with the stress of having been fooled into a suicide quest and killing his own son as the existential dilemma of realizing that mankind is evil by nature, and no god can change that.
the lords dracula balances out the seeming unrepentant evil of classic dracula by making a clear series of causes that lead to the effect that is, in essence, a middle ground between bram stoker's dracula, and mathias cronqvist's ridiculously crazy evil dracula.
while it's not the dracula we want, it is most surely a satisfying piece of character development that creates an entire sidecanon devoted to answering one question
"who is the dracula of castlevania?"

Just something I wanted to put together for teh lulness of it.