Gameplay

More slaying than Buffy

During the course of Soul Reaver, you will kill a LOT of vampires. It seems you can't walk 100 yards without another pack of the fanged buggers turning up. As there are only three ways to kill a vampire, the fights tend toward a bit repetitive. Pimp-slap the vampire into submission (generally easy; a simple matter of holding down the "follow monster" button and hitting "attack" repeatedly), then either throw 'im into fire, water, or a sharp object. Or throw the sharp object into him. The easiest solution is to always carry around a sharp object, as all good slayers know.

Fighting vampires is cool for a while, and always visually pleasing, but there's only so much you can take before you tire of it. Fortunately, there are other fights going on that help to break up the monotony (well, the fighting itself is done the same, except there's no killing move, but oh well). You can fight wraiths, which are nasty soul-sucking creatures in the Spirit world, or humans, which are generally pansy creatures except the ones with flamethrowers, and inhabit the Material world.

Wanna piece of me?

Flame on!

How many worlds?

Did we mention there are two worlds? There's the spirit world, which Raziel normally inhabits in his new form, and the material world, where humans live. The worlds are very similar, but not identical; sometimes puzzles can be solved by finding important differences between the two. Raziel travels between worlds - at full health, he can manifest himself in the material world, though his energy is constantly taxed while he's there. After all, he's a spirit in the material world.

When Raziel isn't fighting monsters, he's either jumping around, moving blocks, or trying to solve puzzles - a-la Mario 64. It would have been nice to find something besides block shoving, but at least Soul Reaver brings a new dimension to it - you can shove bricks up on top of things. Tar me and call me chunky!

The only real gripe (though it's a big gripe) is the camera. Quite simply, it sucks. It acts as if it's controlled either by a lazy construction worker, or a small child that needs to be on Ritalin, but not both, and it changes between these modes at random. Combining this with the fact that movement is relative to camera position, you've got a big control hindrance, which knocks down the gameplay a few notches.

Blood and the darkness

Lookin' badass