Review #229: Soul Reaver 2

 History abhors a paradox.

 Soul Reaver 1 ended on a cliffhanger, and luckily, it was very well received by the press, back in the day, so a sequel wasn't so much of a 'if' but a 'when'. And so with the shiny new technology that the PS2 offered, Soul Reaver 2 came to be.

 The game picks up exactly where the last one left off. Actually, it recreates the final moments of the last game, which is quite amusing to see the last exchanges between Kain and Raziel, but now with a higher polygon count! While the last game was a story about revenge, Soul Reaver 2 is about time travel. Time travelling Vampires and Wraiths, doesn't get any better than this. It's hard to talk about the game's plot without spoiling the last one, or this one, but needless to say, the story is fantastic, and the dialogue is incredible. To be fair, the story can get pretty convoluted, and you may end up asking yourself more questions, but with a little legwork(Internet), you can make perfect sense of it. And by the by, there's no point in playing Soul Reaver 2 without playing the first, you will get lost, and a lot of the beauty of the series' lore will be lost on you.

 Soul Reaver 2 is an almost-entirely different beast than the first one. While Soul Reaver 1 was a huge game, filled to the brim with secrets and optional areas rewarding those that explored or backtracked, Soul Reaver 2 is a very linear almost on-rails experience. There are no secrets, and exploration isn't rewarded, so there's no reason to veer off the given path, not like there's anywhere else to go mind you. Amusingly, the game now finally adds a compass and the much needed map than the previous game should've had... but in this game, it's impossible to get lost or not to know where to go(Just follow the only path available to ya!) so really, there's no use for either of those.

 But hey, there are a bunch of noticeable improvements, most important of them all, the framerate. It's almost glorious 60 fps all the way to the end of the game, with a couple of moments where it could dip, but never below 30. It makes everything run so much better! And the camera is much more manageable than before, it doesn't need constant baby sitting and you can move it with the right analog stick. About damn time! The save system has been revamped as well, now you can only save at certain savespots, and you loading your file starts you back at whichever savespot you last saved. Teleporters are gone, but then again, they are not needed in this game. The way the Reaver works has also been tweaked, now you lose health constantly while on the material realm, but the Reaver can be turned on or off at will. Using the Reaver too much will make it zap your health alarmingly fast, but it's counterweighted by how strong it is.

 Much of the game is spent puzzling, just like the first game, but this time around the puzzles are much simpler. Perhaps a bit too simple, but I'm not complaining, the first one had one or two that were a bit too obtuse. Raziel retains all the abilities he gained from his fallen brethren in the last adventure, but most of the new puzzles revolve around the new Elemental Reavers: Dark, Light, Wind and Flame. As far as I could tell, they don't confer any enhanced damage in combat, but each one has different uses when it comes to traversing Nosgoth. The Wind Reaver is the only one that can destroy doors, while the Dark Reaver can activate bridges, for instance. At the end of the day, I enjoyed the puzzling, they may not have been as hard as the previous game's, but I can appreciate the creativity they spent on them, coming up with widely different puzzles than those seen in Soul Reaver 1, so it doesn't feel like you are treading old ground.

 Combat is the only thing I really disliked about Soul Reaver 2. In Soul Reaver 1, combat was simple, but it was easy to forgive as combat wasn't the game's focus. Enemies in this game aren't vampires, so you don't need to impale or burn them... but they got annoying in other ways. First and foremost, Raziel's attacks are very slow, it doesn't matter if you are using one of the many different weapons that you can find on the material realm, fact of the matter is: Raziel hits slower than any of his enemies. In the previous outing you could make short work of enemies by spamming triangle with the Reaver, not so here. Triangle is an alternate, physical, attack now, an attack that can be blocked. And enemies love to block, and there's no way for you to break their guard, besides using the Reaver(That you really don't want to use unless you really have to due to the new limitations). So, it'd make sense for you to wait until they drop their guard? Wrong. Enemies attack faster than Raziel can sidestep, and unlike Raziel, enemies can and will break your guard. It's a good thing Raziel can't really die, but the combat was dull and boring, to be honest, after the first couple of hours I just decided to skip fighting as many enemies as I could, only stopping by to recharge my Material energy. I guess it's a good thing that the game doesn't have a single Boss!

 The game doesn't look particularly well. Raziel and Kain do look fairly badass and detailed, but the rest of the secondary characters don't fare as well, not to say that they are bad or anything. Common Enemies on the other hand are a bit blander, with fairly forgettable designs and a some rather wonky animations(The 'spin on the air' animation after a 3-hit blade combo is particularly hilarious.) The world of Nosgoth is very pretty, and with the improved draw-distance, it's easier to appreciate the detail that went into designing the game's world, even if it's noticeably smaller than Soul Reaver 1's. It wouldn't be a Legacy of Kain game if it didn't have stellar voice acting now would it? The soundtrack is a bit mediocre for the series standards however.

 As far as I'm concerned, Soul Reaver 2 is an excellent game that only falters in the Combat department. It could've used a few hidden collectibles, boss fights and other elements that the previous game had, but I didn't miss those features as much as I thought I would. The change from an exploration-centric game into such a linear one might throw some people off, but the story was so good, that I kinda appreciated getting to advance the plot much faster.
 8.5 out of 10