Big Swords + Brutal Characters = A game about dressing up…
Ah, Soul Calibur. Whoever came up with the simple idea of adding weapons to a fighting game should be given an award. With all this praise for its sword clashing, nunchuck knock-out goodness, you’d think I’d welcome the new instalment with open arms…well, I did.
Unfortunately, what I got was a bit of a disappointment, albeit from a few next-gen tweaks we all come to expect from our games nowadays. Following a successful run with the series, Namco seem to have taken several steps away from greatness and into the void of gameplay laziness. Past games (especially SC 2) were credited for their fast, frantic and yet fluid gameplay style. Yet with 4, we’re greeted with a much, MUCH, slower format. Moves can still be strung together nicely to form impressive combos, but at the pace of an 80 year old in an egg and spoon race.
Another disappointing aspect is the game’s lack of modes. With previous Soul Calibur games, we were given adventure modes
with interesting different aspects to face up to. Here, we are given a five stage story mode, which can easily be completed in about 15 minutes. And there’s no fancy story telling features here, just a couple of paragraphs at the beginning vaguely explaining the back story of your character and a cut scene at the end. It would have been more interesting throwing in a PowerPoint presentation.
Another disappointing aspect is the game’s lack of modes.
Things pick up a bit when it comes to ‘The Tower Of Lost Souls’ mode, a game where any character of your choice has to scale up a tower, facing many different characters along the way, and perhaps facing them with different status ailments to mix it up. This is similar to adventure modes in the past, but these seem exceptionally more difficult and take on more of a survival mode aspect (i.e. Having to face 13 opponents while climbing 3 floors in a row without a chance for your health to recover), which seems to make the mode a lot more linear.
To help you along your way up the tower, on some levels you are allowed to climb with several more characters, allowing you to switch at any time between characters in the middle of a fight. This is one of Soul Calibur IV’s better points, allowing you to string together multiple combos whilst making the best of several fighting styles.
The final feature to really make this game unique is the character creation, allowing you to configure an existing character in the game or… create one. Although a nice idea, you’ll find that no matter how hard you try, you can never really create a character you will be 100% happy with due to a complex system assigning skill points to weapons and clothing equipped, and this is where a problem lies. The skills system is so complicated (and I won’t bother getting into it) that it makes the game a lot more tactical than it really should be.
In terms of length, there aren’t a lot of things to do, yet there are expansive amounts of items to collect to equip for your character, making this a perfect game for perfectionists.
Overall, a lot of the features in this game ironically make it a double edged sword. Though the ‘Tower Of Lost Souls’ mode is deep, it is fairly tedious after a while. Although there are countless amounts of clothes to unlock, there really isn’t much else. If you’re really into the beat-em-up genre, this will undoubtedly be a classic, and you’ll cope with the fairly slow combat. Yet you won’t find anything immersive enough to suggest that it was money well spent.
The Bad: Not really an improvement for the franchise, Frustratingly repetitive, Slow gameplay
Bronze Y Award