Raziel is back, consuming souls and hunting Kain
What Is It? Soul Reaver 2 is the sequel to PlayStation 1’s Legacy of Kain Soul Reaver, which is widely regarded as one of the best PS1 games of all time. No pressure for Soul Reaver 2 to live up to the hype while making the jump to PlayStation 2. The game was released only two years after the PS1 classic and fits within the larger Legacy of Kain series which saw five total games across PS1 and PS2.
Soul Reaver 2 begins with Raziel continuing to hunt down Kain trying to finally kill him. Moebius, a mysterious time traveler, encourages this pursuit and Raziel is off to explore Nosgoth. There is a lot to this entire story that isn’t worth getting into here, but the basics for Soul Reaver 2 is that you run around Nosgoth and do a wee bit of time traveling as Raziel tries to gain understanding and learn the truth about it all.
The game is a third person action-adventure game with some light platforming elements. Most of your time will be spent within an elaborate puzzle or running to the location of the next elaborate puzzle. You will fight enemies at every turn, gain upgrades to access new areas, and use your half-broken wings to glide every now and then.
Combat has similar bones as the first game, but is changed in questionable ways. Raziel has a wraith fused to his right arm which, after a short time into the game, can be called upon to act as a sword. Using it to hit enemies builds up a strength meter which makes it very powerful, very quickly while having the drawback of draining your health.
Killing enemies with your wraith, however, does not release their souls. This is important because consuming souls is how Raziel heals. You must kill enemies with physical weapons such as swords, spears, or axes in order to release a soul for healing. If you run out of health you get sent to the spectral realm where you must defeat some ghost-looking monsters, consume their souls and find a transformation spot to shift back into the material realm.
The realm shifting also plays a role in most puzzles. You can shift into the spectral realm whenever you want, and you will often need to do so in order to shift reality just enough to be able to jump onto a ledge and reach a spot you couldn’t in the material realm. The main star of the puzzles are the different wraith elements you can imbue. Dark, Light, Air, and Fire will all eventually be unlocked, each with their own purpose. You imbue your wraith with one of these powers at a time through forges placed throughout the world. Figuring out which element you need to get past the next step of the puzzle, and how to physically get to the next spot, is the crux of most of the puzzles here.
The game looks and controls well. It is a step up from the first in both aspects. The classic PlayStation 1 control jank is mostly gone here and everything looks just a bit smoother than it did last time around. The game takes somewhere in the 8-10 hour range to beat. It feels quite front loaded because you will know the world well by the end, not to mention understand the puzzle design philosophy, so it feels like you are flying through the game by the end.
The Best Part: My only real complaint from the first game was that I got lost almost constantly. The games involve a lot of backtracking with their light metroidvania touches. The game was in desperate need of a map. Soul Reaver 2 does not add a detailed map, but it addresses these issues with a better world design and by adding a trail of enemies and cutscenes to let you know you are heading in the right direction. I did go the wrong way a few times, but when I didn’t find anything interesting or see a brief cutscene after a few minutes, I knew I went the wrong direction. It isn’t a perfect solution, a decent map still would have solved this better, but it was effective.
The Worst Part: The combat. Where to start with this? First, the entire system is simply to bash enemies until you trigger the death move. With the wraith they will simply explode, with a physical weapon this will be a beheading or impaling. There is no nuance here, simply bash away until the thing is dead. You can lock on to an enemy, but for specific enemy types it makes things significantly worse. There were stretches of the game where I ran around mashing the light attack button aimlessly because I couldn’t get a hit in while locked on. The developers seem to know that their system is bad as they did not include any boss fights until the final stretch. That itself is not a massive problem, but they make Raziel invincible during all of these. You just mash the attack button until the enemy(s) fall and move on. Fighting essentially the same human enemies you’ve been fighting the entire game, just with a different skin and more HP, but you can’t even take damage. What an anticlimactic ending to a good game.
The Verdict: This game is one step forward, two steps back from the original Soul Reaver in my opinion. One of the first things you do in the original is fight monsters with your claws until they are dizzy, then pick them up and throw them into spikes on the wall to impale them and release their souls. That is, objectively, an amazing way to introduce combat in a videogame. Soul Reaver 2 strips all of the, pardon the pun, soul out of combat here and the game is worse off for it. Additionally, the boss fights were standouts of the first game, but they simply did not include any here. What an absolutely wild design decision to make.
There are many positives, however. The game looks and controls significantly better and it tells a very good story. Better controls and fun puzzles make the game worth playing, stick around for the story if you’re interested.
A true mixed bag, Soul Reaver 2 is still a fun game, just one with boring combat. I would give the original a blanket recommendation to anyone but I can’t do the same for the sequel. If you are invested in the story or want a series of pretty good puzzles within an action-adventure game, Soul Reaver 2 might hit the mark.
How to Play: PlayStation 2*, PC. Remastered 1&2: Playstation 4&5, Xbox Series, Switch, PC
*console played on for this review
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