Mr Durand Pierre
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(Yeah, I know this game is a few years old. But I felt so strongly about it I had to write about it. Deal with it).
I started Soul Reaver 2 the other day. First off I should say that I'm one of those people who primarily plays only one game at a time, so if I'm not feeling like playing a certain game I don't like to jump ahead into my next game in line. But after starting Soul Reaver 2 I realized I hadn't been playing any games in the past 3 days. This is one of the few games in my collection that I'm actually going to at least temporarily give up on. Maybe someday I'll get back to it, maybe...
But before I get into Soul Reaver 2 I should mention what I thought of the first game. I found the first Soul Reaver to be mostly an AMAZING game. It combined exploration, puzzle solving, and combat better than 90% of the games out there. It felt like a perfect hybrid of Zelda/Metroid/Castlevania/and maybe Beyond Good & Evil with it's lack of much combat. Some people thought it had too many block puzzles, or was easy to get lost in, but truthfully I never had a problem with it and I enjoyed the slower paced puzzle-solving aspect of it.
But the game had one fatal flaw: it was never finished. There are huge areas in the game that you can explore, where you can solve an intricate series of puzzles, only to be rewarded by a spell for some kind of spell system that was never completed, and as far as I can tell, does nothing. As a result the game was full of loose ends. Giant loose ends. On one hand this isn't apparent until you've beaten (or almost beaten) the game, but on the other hand it's perhaps the biggest lack of polish I've seen on an otherwise well-polished game. Based on the first 80-90% of the game I would have given it maybe a 9.0 or even a coveted 9.5, but after the end I couldn't give it anything higher than a generous 8.5.
But I was expecting a lot more from the sequel. I heard it had better puzzles and combat, and was actually a completed product. I figured the only reason it only scored an 81% at game-rankings is because a slow-paced puzzle game isn't everyone's cup of tea, and as a sequel it's less revolutionary than its predecessor.
But after spending about 5 hours on Soul Reaver 2 it turns out that it wasn't underrated at all, but rather overrated.
First off, there are a lot of good things about Soul Reaver 2. The puzzles continue to be intriguing and just the right difficulty level, the graphics are great if a tad bit dated by today's standards, Nasgoth is a geeky-gothy fanboy wetdream, and the addition of the soul reaver gaining power as you use it, but it draining energy, is a welcome addition that should bring some strategy to the combat. It's also worth mentioning that the voice-acting and story are first-rate as far as video-games go. With only a little more work this could have been great, but the designers made some subtle, but horrible decisions that almost entirely ruin the game such as:
-Lack of save points. The game is easy enough that getting an actual game-over is extremely rare, and there are always checkpoints along the way anyhow, but as far as actual save-points go there are FAR too few. Unless you can commit to playing for at least a solid 90 minutes you'd be better off not playing. The save points aren't always that far apart, but that's a pretty good estimate to be on the safe side. 45-70 minutes is a better average.
-Too much unneccessery backtracking. Okay, backtracking is not always a bad thing in games. I find that the Metroid series has perfected the art of backtracking, since you're always gaining new powers and the game world is littered with secrets and power-ups. Not so with Soul Reaver 2. The first Soul Reaver at least had some nifty little secret items ot find to increase your health meter, but not in Soul Reaver 2. There is NOTHING secret in this game. No power-ups, spells, money, cutscenes, zip, zilch, nadda. Even worse, the game world resembles a straight line that you'll ran back and forth through. So it's not even a puzzle to figure out where to go anymore. And yet enemies respawn and there's a whole lot of backtracking in the game.
Now the first Soul Reaver had warp points. And you could save at any time, then use these points to catch up to where you left off. Why they got rid of this system is beyond me. Maybe to make the game longer. But as a result it's simply a whole lot more tedious.
-The "improved" combat is somehow even worse. A lot of people didn't like the combat in the first Soul Reaver due to its simplicity, but I liked it for that very reason. It wasn't a big part of the game by any means, and was simply there to spice things up a bit. But here combat is central. It's like half the game. And enemies constantly respawn (unlike the first game, where they rarely did). Sure you've got different types of attacks, and a dodge button, and a block move, but the controls feel clunky and rigid. It ends up simply being a whole lot of button-mashing.
That's essentially it. While I only have those three complaints, they're really huge ones that completely ruin the flow of the game and suck all the enjoyment out of it. Which is too bad, because the parts of the game that work, really work. There should be a truly great Soul Reaver game, and yet there isn't. For shame Eidos... for shame...
I started Soul Reaver 2 the other day. First off I should say that I'm one of those people who primarily plays only one game at a time, so if I'm not feeling like playing a certain game I don't like to jump ahead into my next game in line. But after starting Soul Reaver 2 I realized I hadn't been playing any games in the past 3 days. This is one of the few games in my collection that I'm actually going to at least temporarily give up on. Maybe someday I'll get back to it, maybe...
But before I get into Soul Reaver 2 I should mention what I thought of the first game. I found the first Soul Reaver to be mostly an AMAZING game. It combined exploration, puzzle solving, and combat better than 90% of the games out there. It felt like a perfect hybrid of Zelda/Metroid/Castlevania/and maybe Beyond Good & Evil with it's lack of much combat. Some people thought it had too many block puzzles, or was easy to get lost in, but truthfully I never had a problem with it and I enjoyed the slower paced puzzle-solving aspect of it.
But the game had one fatal flaw: it was never finished. There are huge areas in the game that you can explore, where you can solve an intricate series of puzzles, only to be rewarded by a spell for some kind of spell system that was never completed, and as far as I can tell, does nothing. As a result the game was full of loose ends. Giant loose ends. On one hand this isn't apparent until you've beaten (or almost beaten) the game, but on the other hand it's perhaps the biggest lack of polish I've seen on an otherwise well-polished game. Based on the first 80-90% of the game I would have given it maybe a 9.0 or even a coveted 9.5, but after the end I couldn't give it anything higher than a generous 8.5.
But I was expecting a lot more from the sequel. I heard it had better puzzles and combat, and was actually a completed product. I figured the only reason it only scored an 81% at game-rankings is because a slow-paced puzzle game isn't everyone's cup of tea, and as a sequel it's less revolutionary than its predecessor.
But after spending about 5 hours on Soul Reaver 2 it turns out that it wasn't underrated at all, but rather overrated.
First off, there are a lot of good things about Soul Reaver 2. The puzzles continue to be intriguing and just the right difficulty level, the graphics are great if a tad bit dated by today's standards, Nasgoth is a geeky-gothy fanboy wetdream, and the addition of the soul reaver gaining power as you use it, but it draining energy, is a welcome addition that should bring some strategy to the combat. It's also worth mentioning that the voice-acting and story are first-rate as far as video-games go. With only a little more work this could have been great, but the designers made some subtle, but horrible decisions that almost entirely ruin the game such as:
-Lack of save points. The game is easy enough that getting an actual game-over is extremely rare, and there are always checkpoints along the way anyhow, but as far as actual save-points go there are FAR too few. Unless you can commit to playing for at least a solid 90 minutes you'd be better off not playing. The save points aren't always that far apart, but that's a pretty good estimate to be on the safe side. 45-70 minutes is a better average.
-Too much unneccessery backtracking. Okay, backtracking is not always a bad thing in games. I find that the Metroid series has perfected the art of backtracking, since you're always gaining new powers and the game world is littered with secrets and power-ups. Not so with Soul Reaver 2. The first Soul Reaver at least had some nifty little secret items ot find to increase your health meter, but not in Soul Reaver 2. There is NOTHING secret in this game. No power-ups, spells, money, cutscenes, zip, zilch, nadda. Even worse, the game world resembles a straight line that you'll ran back and forth through. So it's not even a puzzle to figure out where to go anymore. And yet enemies respawn and there's a whole lot of backtracking in the game.
Now the first Soul Reaver had warp points. And you could save at any time, then use these points to catch up to where you left off. Why they got rid of this system is beyond me. Maybe to make the game longer. But as a result it's simply a whole lot more tedious.
-The "improved" combat is somehow even worse. A lot of people didn't like the combat in the first Soul Reaver due to its simplicity, but I liked it for that very reason. It wasn't a big part of the game by any means, and was simply there to spice things up a bit. But here combat is central. It's like half the game. And enemies constantly respawn (unlike the first game, where they rarely did). Sure you've got different types of attacks, and a dodge button, and a block move, but the controls feel clunky and rigid. It ends up simply being a whole lot of button-mashing.
That's essentially it. While I only have those three complaints, they're really huge ones that completely ruin the flow of the game and suck all the enjoyment out of it. Which is too bad, because the parts of the game that work, really work. There should be a truly great Soul Reaver game, and yet there isn't. For shame Eidos... for shame...
YOU - To be Continued" screen at the end of the game just like the first Soul Reaver. I thought to myself "there's no way in hell they're gonna leave us hanging after all the shit they took for the non-ending of the first game", but that's exactly what they did.
