This review was originally written on my personal blog circa 5 years ago. So any references to "last night" or "last year" or whatever are inaccurate at best. Deal. Also Jedi Academy is mentioned, and I WILL be reviewing that, but it's part of a long string of reviews that covers the entire series, so it will take me a while to compile.

Also, in case you couldn't tell, I'm the angry one.

So I installed Soul Reaver 2: Legacy of Kain last night. I enjoyed a previous Soul Reaver game on the playstation, and I had hoped that Soul Reaver 2 would be a nice game to play, especially since I had just finished Jedi Academy. Maybe playing another game of the same type right after Jedi Academy was not such a good idea. Either JA is way better than I thought, or Soul Reaver 2 is an unpolished console port. I'm going to have to go with the latter. The menu system for Soul Reaver is unbelievably atrocious. All the menus auto-scroll, the mouse sometimes stops working, and the video settings menu seems thrown in more for show than anything else. All video settings must be made outside the game before you even start. This is a classic example of a bad console port. Nothing was improved for the PC, it was all just moved over onto a nice shiny silver CD.

Once you get in the game, the bad control scheme becomes apparent. The camera is free moving, which means that wherever you try to move, you end up moving in a slightly different direction, since you are used to a camera that always stays behind your character. For instance, with a fixed camera, if you wanted to circle an enemy, you would press forward and left, and then move the mouse to the right at a slow pace to keep yourself constantly running 5ft to the left of the person you are targeting, and placing the camera behind your character and pointing slightly right, keeping the enemy in sight. In Soul Reaver, you cannot do this. Your movement keys are based on the camera, not the character, so performing the exact same action as described before keeps you always with the enemy directly to your right, with the camera facing nowhere useful. The developers tried to solve this by utilizing two methods, both of which suck. First, the default control scheme has no keys for left and right, there is only a forward button, and it defaults to being on the mouse. Second, there is a "lock on" key, that keeps your character always facing the enemy. The camera zooms out so you can see the whole fight, and you move your character with the movement keys. However, "forward" does not seem to work in lock-on mode, so any time you use it to attack an enemy, you just wait for him to get close, and hit him once, then wait again.

There are helpful little windows that pop up during the game the first time you encounter a certain situation. For instance, the first time I got to a door, a little box popped up that said "press attack to open doors." That would have been very useful if it didn't disappear the instant I pressed a key. Since I was pressing "forward" to run towards the door, the box disappeared immediately. Stupid. Also, every time an enemy dies you have the option of performing a finishing move. Unfortunately, choosing to finish the enemy involves pressing "attack," which is something that you're already doing, since you're in a fight. Finishing moves leave you very vulnerable, and they MAKE YOU DROP YOUR WEAPON! GOOD CALL ON THAT ONE!

One last complaint is the thing that I always hate about console ports. Save points. I'm sitting here with a computer that can hold the entire contents of the game more than 300 times over, and I can't save my progress anywhere I want. I played the game for 45 minutes before finding my first save point, and 45 minutes later I hadn't found a second one, so I quit the game, uninstalled, and started writing this. Also, stupid.

The game does have its strong points though. The character design for Raziel (you) is amazingly cool. The entire concept of the game is cool too. I'd like Raven to get their hands on this license and really give us something great to mess with. Here's the concept of the game: You are an undead vampire avenger who is possessed by the spirit of an extremely powerful sword. You can call the sword forth at will from your body (it has the same effect and feel of a lightsaber in the JK games), but if you kill too many people with the sword, it will become too powerful and attempt to take over your body (therefore ending the game). There are no health packs in the game, instead you suck the souls of your fallen enemies to regain your life. There are checkpoints strewn throughout the game, about twice as often as there are save points (so, every 20 minutes or so), so if you die, it's not a HUGE deal, but still aggravating. As a vampire, you have slightly more abilities than a normal person. Aside from the soul sucking and the ghost sword, you can do a super-jump, you (apparently) take no damage from falling long distances, and you can use your cape to glide.

Now, for the really cool part of the game, the part that made it so promising in my eyes. There are two dimensions. Each dimension is constructed slightly differently. It's like you are playing parallel games. You can change between the dimensions at will, and there are different enemies and slightly different gameplay opportunities in each dimension. In the "normal" world everything works like it should. In the "spirit" world, you can phase through doors, jump a lot higher, and your ghost sword doesn't try to take over your body. Also, you regenerate your health slowly in the spirit world. The only problem is, in order to go back to the real world, you have to find a world shift portal (located about every quarter mile, or near every important place). Going from the real world to the spirit world can be done at will, and it might be based on your health, maybe. I didn't play long enough to verify the mechanics exactly.

Another great thing they did with gameplay is that some obstacles can only be passed in the spirit world, and some can only be passed in the real world. At one point in the game, you come across a cliff with two pillars on either side. The pillars have markings on them similar to the button you use to go between worlds (conveniently). By changing to spirit form, the cliff morphs and becomes steps. Neato. This is kind of like what they did with force sight in Jedi Academy, and I heartily approve. It's a shame that I can't save when I want or actually control my character, or I'd be playing this game for the next week and recommending it to my friends. Friends, this game is frustrating, don't buy it. As a side note, I have the sneaking suspicion that I also own this game for Dreamcast, so I might go dig that out and tell you if the experience is any better on the console. I probably won't though, I played for an hour and sat through 45 minutes of cutscenes. It reminded me of Sword of the Berserk.