Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver

"Sorry... what was Tomb Raider again?"

I think I first saw this at a friend's of a friend's. He was showing us some new stuff he had on his PlayStation. One was a very nice looking 3D platformer with a high res, enormous world, pretty good graphics and huge amounts of ways of killing people very viciously.

Now that game was Soul Reaver, the second in the relatively new ''Legacy of Kain'' series that sprang up on the PlayStation in 95/96 (I think). And now it's hear on the Dreamcast, with very little changes. But that doesn't make it a bad game.

OK, let's get started. Kain, the eponymous vampire from Blood Omen, has conquered Nosgoth for his evil vampire hordes and rules from his throne, content with the evil his mates are spreading. His various vampire clans do his bidding, and each clan has a head. Raziel is one of the heads.

When it comes to the evolution of the vampires, Kain emerges first with the new gift, followed by the heads of the clans. Unfortunately, Raziel was blessed with the gift of evolution first - a pair of wings. Kain rewarded him by throwing him into a lake (not generally a good thing for vampires - at least not in this game). Coming to many centuries later, Raziel learns that he didn't survive. But an ancient being known as the Elder offers him a chance of revenge against his former master.

Intros over, Soul Reaver is basically a Tomb Raider-esque 3rd person explora-thon, but with a few major differences.

The first major difference is, of course, to do with playing in two realms at once. I don't know really how to describe this - you play in two worlds, and can travel between them. The first world is the physical world - reality, as it were. The second is the spectral world, where things are twisted, including physical surroundings. Now, there are some things you can only do in one world that you cannot in the other. For instance, you can only move and use objects in the physical realm, but in the spectral realm you can phase through some things and water has no mass, so you can go through underwater passages without being hindered by either swimming against currents or your body suffering from the water's effects. Also, like I said, the spectral realm's surroundings can change slightly from the physical one's, and this can give you the edge you need, such as something to stand on to get to a ledge. You can change from the physical world to the spectral at any time, but you need to find certain spots to change back. These are normally in quite easy to find places, but are handy for solving puzzles between the two realms.

OK, that's the difficult stuff over. The world itself is not split into levels, but more like areas. It's all one large world effectively (unfortunately leading to large amounts of fogging) and areas are unlocked depending on what abilities you have. If you can't climb walls, for instance, you can't scale a cliff to reach a new area. Abilities are gained for beating bosses, and it's more than likely you need a new ability to reach a new area.

As for controlling the character, well, it's a lot of good, but also some bad. The character Raziel moves extremely well, and very fluid. His actions and the feel of control are many times more natural than Lara Croft. He turns faster, reacts faster, and has many commands that don't require complex key-presses. It's just a shame that, in the Dreamcast version at least, the controls leave a lot to be desired.

Saving the game can be done at any time, but in re-starting you end up back at the Elder's shrine. Fortunately you can find a few mirrors through the game that allow you to walk from one part of the game to another pretty quickly. Unfortunately you can get lost easily, but there are assisstants who you can go to, both in the Elder shrine and in Kain's throne room, who tell you (rather cryptically though) roughly what to do.

This game is full of puzzles as well, and most of them can be quite tedious. These include the moving the boxes so they match up with a wall mural ones, which can have a lot of to-ing and fro-ing as you get the box correct so it looks like it matches, find out it only nearly does, then have to find the EXACT match. These can get rather tedious really.

But now for the killing, and the main reason a lot of people will like this. Being a rogue vampire, Raziel naturally has to face other vampires, as well as a few humans and spectral creatures. Humans are easy to get rid of because they're weak - just hit them a few times. Spectral things - hit them a few times and suck their souls before they gather enough strength to take on substance again. But vampires - hit them, then you either find a weapon, kill them and absorb their souls, or they'll come back to get ya!

Of course this leads to the quite fun matter of killing them. First of course you wear them down, and then you've got to make your mind up. Do you chuck them in some water, some direct sunlight, or some fire? Do you make them explode (using the Soul Reaver), hang them on a spike on the wall, set them alight, or simply drive a pointy thing through them? Or if you can't decide or don't have the necessary resources, simply chuck them somewhere (eg down a cliff) so you can get away. That's where the real beauty of the game lies in my opinion, but of course you have to deal with vampires who develop immunities to sunlight or water and so on.

Graphics wise, this game doesn't look much different than the PlayStation version. But that's not very bad, because they PlayStation version looked exceptional. It has some nice textures and character models, some decent lighting effects, but a lot of fogging.

Sound wise the game isn't much cop either, with probably the best thing being the theme of the game. It's also the only music I really remember without listening to the music itself.

But let's weigh out the pros and cons -

Pros +
++++++
+ Great setting
+ Many ways to kill
+ Huge world
+ Nice story
+ Graphics are OK
+ Some really evil puzzles
+ Changing between realms thing

Cons -
- Graphics are OK
- Music?
- Controls
- Some really evil puzzles (see block moving ones)

Overall =
=========
This beats Tomb Raider in every aspect in my opinion. An excellent game that's only really let down by some tedious puzzles and controls which aren't all that good. If you don't mind it not being that much better graphically than the PlayStation version, and want a nice, taxing, 3D platformer with some great twists, this is highly recommended.

8 out of 10

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 03/24/02, Updated 03/24/02