When I first started up The Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver I was more than happy to see where this franchise was going. I was well aware that Silicon Knights didn’t make the next game. But Chrystal Dynamic wanted to make sure I knew. One of the first screens in the game tells you clearly in white on black text that Blood Omen was made by Silicon Knights and that Soul Reaver is made by Chrystal Dynamic. One major thing they improved on was there were as little loads as possible. Besides the first one starting up the game, the game will actively load everything as you play it. Which I would have to imagine was very impressive for its time.
An issue the first game had was the tutorial. Or in this case the lack of one. Luckily in Soul Reaver it at least tells you what buttons do what and when to use them. It also briefly explains the simple game mechanics and then boots you out the door to figure everything else out. You still have to reference the manual for simple things like figuring out that you can pick up spears and lighting torches. Both of these examples are vital to the gameplay.
The opening pre-rendered cinematic looks great. It looks almost as good as the games later in the franchise on the next gen of consoles. The biggest difference in this game is that it is now a full three dimensional game. I played this on the first PlayStation however and it suffers from twitchy textures and a very low draw distance. The character design incredible. All of the characters clothes are interesting and well realized. I found myself just looking at Razial’s character enjoying what an odd character he is. He seems so inhuman and yet relatable; very demonic and yet heroic. His animation is great as well. His movement has a lot of personality. You can really see the weight to his step. He seems very frail and yet extremely strong. Blood covers your foe’s body darkening their textures. It looks very good considering the technology they had to work with. Even without loading the quick traveling within the game doesn’t have a load screen. Chrystal Dynamic uses a very nice effect that games of its time had never seen before. Sense the game has a material and spirit realms that you shift through Chrystal Dynamics had to pretty much design two games at once. The spirit realm looks similar to its material counterpart however the color pallet becomes much colder with a lot of greens and blues. The environment also twists and deform. Pillars skew and are shaped differently in the spirit realm which come into play with the games plat forming.
I am glad that we are seeing less and less plat forming in gaming because the only reason it ever is hard is based around how unresponsive the game is. The plat forming in Soul Reaver is extremely difficult. The jumps are quick and look nice with Razial’s animalistic style but it makes it very difficult to time jumps and aim for a landing. I found myself cursing at my TV when I would miss a jump and have to run back through half the level to just try it again, and fail. It was almost game breaking at times and I was tempted on more than one occasion to not finish the game.
Sadly Soul Reaver doesn’t try to be The Legend of Zelda as Blood Omen did. There are a few inspirations in there like finding new abilities that would let you access the next section of the game. The game also has very similar heart pieces system. Where you collect four of a broken object and when you complete it your maximum health will increase. But I felt it was pointless to get them because when you die in Soul Reaver you just revert to spirit realm. In spirit realm you have to devour souls to recover your health so you can then go back into the living world. So you really can’t lose this game. Unless you die in spirit realm which is extremely difficult because the enemies aren’t very hostile and are easy to kill. I only really died once. And when you do die you just revert back to the place you start the game whenever you turn it on. None of your progress is lost. You just have to run all the way back. I found the music very irritating. It has a very simple tune with each section of the game and there are never more than 3 instruments playing. Or at least that’s what it sounds like. Although it is interesting how you change between the realms it doesn’t make up for it because you spend 90% of the game in the material realm. I found it very hard to tell where to go next. A character in game always tells you where to go but they describe it in such a way that would make sense in reality. However in a video game with set paths and no maps it can be very hard to understand the area in which they are describing so vaguely. I found myself referencing a walkthrough probably more then I should have.
When I started my first fight I was excited to get into an action adventure game where it had a dodge mechanic. I love to jump around in a video game and bob and weave between my enemies. I was having fun with it at first until I realized it was much more efficient to just run around and swipe the Soul Reaver like a kid with a new toy. Because attacking while running didn’t interrupt your stride in the slightest it was best to just run around and attack blindly. Instead of sucking blood in Soul Reaver you have to consume souls. Which is a nice mechanic forcing you to get into combat if you want to regain health, Instead of avoiding it. It can often be very difficult to kill enemies in the living realm. Because everything you fight is some form of evolved vampire. Sense all the vampires within this fiction have the same weaknesses and cannot die unless you use them it can be very difficult to kill them some times . Fire, water, and impalement are their weakness. So unless you have the Soul Reaver you have to find a way to kill them using one of these elements. As for water you have to stun them first by hitting them enough with Razial’s claws. Once they enter the same fatality shaking head animation as Blood Omen loved so much, you can pick them up and throw them into a pool of water. For fire you can throw Vampire into fire pit or light them on fire with torches. But to impale a vampire you had to either throw them into spikes mounted onto the walls or pick up a spear and ram it through their stomach. I found the best route was just to find a spear and then do my best to keep it with me. You can always easily kill vampires with the Soul Reaver. But in this installment of the Legacy of Kain you can only wield it when you have full health. It becomes the most frustrating thing when you get hit and loose it. You have to resort back to using the environment to kill and there isn’t always something around to use. It gets even more frustrating when the enemies you just killed respawn. Very often I would just run past foes not bothering if it just meant I was going to get hit and loose the Soul Reaver. At some point in the game you gain a projectile attack which helps greatly but at that point in the game I already was used to running by most of the fodder enemies and forgot I had the ability completely.
In the end this game is much more of a puzzle game then a fighting game. The puzzles are very well thought out and often extremely difficult. I spent a good hour just figuring out a single one and when I was finished I was very satisfied that I figured it out. Soul Reaver uses simple block puzzles like we all have become so familiar with in the action adventure genre. But it adds one thing, the ability to flip the blocks over. This alone creates a whole new depth to block puzzling. Making you flip the blocks so that they are on just the right side to align with a picture for example. Or flipping blocks on top of each other so you can stack them. But like most things in this game it does a very poor job at teaching you that you can do this. You are forced to reference the manual to figure this out which is a very poor way to design a game. A good amount of the puzzles are solved by going into the spirit realm and interacting with things in a different way. Because you cannot move things like doors and blocks you are limited to what you can do. However the world warps in ways that may help you get to the next area.
As I expected the fiction is very rich and the story seems to be playing out in a very interesting way. I am extremely interested to see how everything plays out throughout the next three games. Even though there is less dialog in this game the story is still this game’s strongest element. It ends on a cliff hanger that I’m glad that I am able to open up the next game and play it right away. Instead of waiting 2 years like everyone else had to.