Soul Reaver 2

"Soul Reaver 2 is a mixed bag of an awesome story dragged down by a frustrating and sometimes boring gameplay experience."

Score:
Gameplay: 6
Graphics: 7
Sound: 9
Value: 7
Tilt: 9

Overall: 7.5

The Good: Another awesome opening movie; great storyline; new puzzles are a refreshing change of pace from all of the block puzzles from the sequel; time travel; awesome voice acting and music; soul reaver can be used at will in the material realm instead of only at full health.

The Bad: Too much backtracking, repetitive and dull combat, dull combat sound effects, cheap enemy AI, game is extremely punishing if you die in the underworld due to the lack of save points and checkpoints; no boss fights; extremely short compared to the original; elemental glyph powers mysteriously gone; soul reaver in the material realm is still extremely limited in its use.

The Legacy of Kain is a series of games that have gone through so many changes it's almost ridiculous. The first game, Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen focused on a character named Kain which was developed by Silicon Knights. Strangely a sequel was made that took place thousands of years later, the main character of the original Legacy of Kain became the bad guy instead of the "hero" and a new main character was made. Fans of the original game may have been initially upset but Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver was an outstanding achievement in many ways. It was beautiful for a PlayStation game, had no loading times whatsoever, and had tons of challenging puzzles that were just waiting to be solved. Story, puzzle solving and exploration were the high points in Soul Reaver, and combat was something that was there but was not the main focus of the game. The combat was also not too terribly deep, however it was fun because of all of the numerous ways of disposing of your vampiric foes. Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 2 picks up directly where the original Soul Reaver left off, but many of the great gameplay features of the original game were lost along the way.

Part of the reason why Soul Reaver was so interesting was because of it's wide variety of dealing with the enemies that you would undoubtedly face throughout your journey. Since all of your foes other than the human vampire hunters were of a vampiric nature they could not be killed by simply slashing away at them with claws and weapons. These enemies had to be impale, burned, scorched or thrown into a pool of water which would burn them as if it was acid. The majority of the enemies you would face were vampires, however there were also human enemies who would don medieval looking armor and wield crossbows and flamethrowers, where they would try and protect the dwindling human civilization from the hordes of demonic vampires that prowled the land. These foes were easier to destroy but added much to the atmosphere of a doomed world.

However, due to the events of the last Soul Reaver game Raziel and Kain are no longer in the same time period they were in the last game, they are in fact in a time period that occurred thousands of years before the events of Soul Reaver. Because of this the entirety of the game is spent fighting majorly against human opponents. This is where the game fails to deliver entirely. The combat in Soul Reaver wasn't one of it's high points but it was still entertaining enough when you had to be engaged it in, and it didn't happen often enough to become a chore. In Soul Reaver 2 much of the game is spent in combat and even from the beginning of the game; it isn't fun.

The enemy AI is a mix of being extremely poor and being beyond cheap and unfair. Enemies are capable of doing extremely quick attacks of long range and are also capable of doing powerful slamming attacks which you are inexplicably incapable of doing despite using the exact same weapons. This causes for some extremely frustrating moments when you try and approach your enemy but they keep simply knocking you back away from them draining you of all your life force before you can even get close to them. This is however due to using the lock-on feature which is meant for combat. Even dodging around your enemy isn't worth the effort because half of the time you "dodge" the enemy's attack and it somehow changes direction and follows you despite the fact that you dodged it. This is extremely annoying and I've found that it is simply easier to defeat enemies by running in circles around them hammering the square button because when you do this the enemy you are attacking doesn't do anything. This strategy does not always work however because other enemies in the area will come and hammer away on your while you're trying to defeat one enemy and the combat system simply isn't designed well enough for you to deal with more than one enemy at a time. Combat isn't always a frustrating experience due to a certain story sequence which enables Raziel to summon the Soul Reaver at will instead of only at full strength which was a large limitation of this powerful weapon in the first game. However, the Reaver is rendered almost useless in large fights because now that you can use it whenever you want to it consumes the souls of your defeated enemies instead of letting you consume them. This is extremely annoying for two reasons. The first reason is because it is difficult to defeat these enemies with swords and conventional weapons which is the only way to absorb the soul yourself. The other reason is because once the Soul Reaver claims enough souls it becomes unstable and damages Raziel. So you can either take damage by risking attacking enemies with conventional weapons and only recovering the health you lost fighting the enemies in the first place, or killing them easily with the Soul Reaver and not recover any health at all. The simple fact of the matter is that combat is effectively pointless other than slowing down your progress in the game and making it longer. I found that I was better off jumping over and running away from most of the enemies only fighting when it was absolutely necessary.

Combat is also less entertaining than in the original Soul Reaver because the sound effects just aren't present here. When you are attacking the human enemies it sounds as if you are hitting a piece of cardboard with a stick when you are in fact hitting an enemy wearing steel armor with a sword. Only when weapons clash does it actually sound remotely realistic and even then the sound effects are very dull. This goes for pretty much every enemy you encounter during the game. The only material plane enemies which sound decent are the electric demons you fight much later on in the game which are some of the most ridiculously over powered and frustrating enemies I've ever fought in any game. The spectral realm on the other hand which returns in Soul Reaver 2, although to a lesser extent sounds much better but still suffers from the same sound problem. The Sluagh enemies return but for some reason when you attack them they only make the appropriate sound "sometimes" other times there is no contact sound at all like most of the other enemies which really bogs down the entire experience of combat. The ambience in the game has also been reduced drastically and was also changed for the worse in the spectral realm which is kind of disappointing.

The puzzles in Soul Reaver 2 return but say goodbye to block puzzles because they are not present. This is good and also a shame. True, block puzzles are not the most interesting type of puzzles out there but they were interesting enough in the original Soul Reaver that they felt like a significant part of the game that one would almost expect to see them in the sequel. They are instead replaced with puzzles that involve finding keys to open doors by killing the enemy holding it. These puzzles are also mixed with many puzzle aspects which involve using the soul reaver. The soul reaver was used to open doors in the original soul reaver and could also be imbued with fire but was never used to solve puzzles. All of the puzzles in Soul Reaver 2 however end with you gaining a new power for the soul reaver itself, which are then used to solve later puzzles and access new areas. The best puzzles in the game are not until much later though. One thing about the puzzle that is the most annoying though, is that they are only in 5 areas in the game. The four forges and in one area I will not spoil but you must traverse through it to meet a certain character. Puzzles in the original Soul Reaver were used all over the place to progress in the game and to get to the next boss but in Soul Reaver 2 they are only there to gain new powers for the Soul Reaver. One small problem with the puzzles, especially if you haven't played the original game, is that often it is not entirely clear what you are supposed to be doing, so be prepared for a lot of frustration in some areas, or have a walkthrough handy. Other than the puzzle solving, the rest of the game is just mindless backtracking in poorly lit areas fighting cheap opponents with mind numbingly poor combat and sound effects.

Another aspect worth touching on about how disappointing the combat is, is that there are no boss fights, at all. There is not a single boss fight in the entire game. There were at least six boss fights I can think of off the top of my head in the original Soul Reaver and in this one there are none. These boss fights were like mini-puzzles in the since that you didn't just go up and attack them, you actually had to find out what you need to do to destroy them because they were like mountains compared to Raziel, so ultimately it is very disappointing to see them go.

Soul Reaver 2 while not a long game by any standards is the type of game that would benefit from being able to save whenever possible. This was the fact in the original Soul Reaver, but whenever you resumed your game after turning the system off you started back in the underworld in the same place every time. You could resume your game by traveling through a warp gate that would take you to other activated warp gates spread throughout the land of Nosgoth. Soul Reaver 2 however does not have any warp gates which forces you to backtrack continuously throughout the game and also only lets you save at save points which are scarce at best. The onl way that the game counters this however is by having checkpoints spread throughout the world but they are also not a common sight in this particular section of Nosgoth. Soul Reaver 2 is also extremely punishing to players when they die in the spectral realm because due to the limited checkpoints players will often be sent back very far away only because they died fighting a cheap demon enemy that can follow you into the spectral realm, just after whooping your ass in the material realm. The original Soul Reaver was punishing because you were sent back to the Elder God's chamber when you died in the spectral realm but you could use the warp gates to get back to where you were and resume your progress. However, in Soul Reaver 2 you are sent back to a checkpoint and pretty much have to redo everything. This however does not happen often so is not a huge problem and is also completely avoidable if you're a smart player, but is still a nuisance.

Graphically Soul Reaver is still an impressive looking game, considering it was an early PS2 game, and it also has no loading time during the adventure at all. There was also only one time in the entire game where the framerate started to chug a little. However despite the game looking decent in most areas the enemies are poorly designed and some of the time it is impossible to tell what they even are. The mutant enemies of the future look like big blobs of brown turd moving around and the human enemies look really lame and slightly cartoony compared to how they looked in the original Soul Reaver.

The biggest complaint I have about Soul Reaver 2 is that the game is just too damn dark. In many areas of the game it's unnecessarily dark and it creates a lot of confusion on where you are and where you are supposed to be going. Sometimes you may find yourself wandering in circles simply because it was so dark you missed a passage way into another area. It's funny too because the areas that are dark are in the material realm, and it is actually easier to navigate in many areas in the spectral realm rather than the material realm. Some of these areas include the underwater caverns where the Elder God resides and the swamp which is just after this area. Be prepared to go through these areas more times than you would like to, due to our good old friend known as "backtracking to make the game seem longer".

The only other complaint is that there is also the occasional tearing and clipping and this was also a present problem in the original game but is nothing to sneer at and isn't really that noticeable unless you're looking for it.

Despite the not entirely interesting combat experiences of Soul Reaver 2, the voice acting and musical score is still amazing. Michael Bell, Simon Templeman and Tony Jay reprise their roles as Raziel, Kain and the Elder God in one of the best character performances in a video game. They are just as good as they were in the original games they were all featured in and will not disappoint.

The music in Soul Reaver 2 for the most part is also very good but is not as good as it was in the original game. Most of the tracks are fairly good and the occasional one isn't very interesting, but for the most part the soundtrack is still great. The high point however is that the voice acting is so phenomenal it really just blurs out anything negative that could even been mentioned about the sound besides the dull combat sound effects.

The length of Soul Reaver 2 depends largely on whether or not you use a walkthrough. Using a walkthrough you could finish this game in under 10 hours. Without using a walkthrough at all it could take you anywhere from up to 20 hours or more because some of the puzzles can be frustrating due to it not being entirely clear what you are supposed to be doing or where you are supposed to go. However after you finish the game there is a code which tells you how to unlock a boat load of bonus features including footage of the actors voicing their characters showing the footage in the corner of the game characters interacting which is a really cool feature which is worth watching for any fan of the series. There is also a ton of really cool character artwork in store which is neat to browse through.

Overall Soul Reaver 2 is a decent game on it's own, but is a disappointing in the sense of what people have come to expect from this franchise. The original game had so many great things going for it: cool ways of destroying vampire foes, cool vampire hunters with flamethrowers, challenging yet rewarding puzzles, wonderful storyline, awesome eldritch energy spells, boss fights, et cetera. Too many of these wonderful gameplay aspects are arbitrarily missing from Soul Reaver 2 and it's hard to not be disappointed when you know it could have been a lot better than it is. Soul Reaver 2 isn't a bad game and is recommended to fans of the original if only just for the great story which includes some awesome cutscenes and plot twists, but if you haven't experienced this series yet you're better off tracking down the earlier games in the series before deciding whether or not Soul Reaver 2 is for you.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 10/30/06