When deciding to marathon the Legacy of Kain series, it was Soul Reaver that I was looking forward to the most. At points I even thought about starting with it and skipping Blood Omen entirely because I was just that eager to finally play it. It's generally regarded as the best in the series but I knew every LoK game has underwhelming gameplay so I didn't go into it with high expectations, only moderate ones, and this game still managed to be a let down in almost every aspect.

Generally though, what Blood Omen did well, is still done well in Soul Reaver. The story is again, the best part of the game and it starts off with what might be my favourite CGI Opening to any game I've played. I need to gush about it, it's so good, It establishes Raziel as essentially being Kain's favourite son and then has him killed by Kain in the same scene which does a perfect job in emphasizing just how fargone Kain has become. The image of Raziel having his wings ripped off by Kain has been branded into my brain ever since I first saw it and it was my main motivator for starting the series. The rest of the story is good too, narration is still strong here and listening to Raziel's musings on how twisted and decayed the world he once knew has become were the best parts of the game for me. Problem is, there's just not as much narration this time around, compared to Blood Omen, Raziel barely talks here and yeah, it makes sense for a guy whose basically been tortured and scorched for 500 years to not be very talkative but it's still disappointing. Still, the conversations that Raziel shares with Kain and his lieutenants are great and it's what kept me going right until the very end even when I just wished the game was over. Too bad that when the game is finally over, it doesn't end with a bang, not even a spark, just an absolute dud of an abrupt To Be Continued screen.

Okay so why don't I like this game, well let's start with the minor stuff. The combat at the start is awful, enemies have 0 windup to their attacks and Raziel's attacks will whiff randomly leading you to just getting interrupted in the middle of your string, killing enemies is also a hassle since it requires using the environment to your advantage by grabbing the enemies when they're stunned and throwing them into something lethal like sunlight, fire, spikes etc. Cool idea for sure, but in execution it just feels inconvenient. But this is only a minor issue since you can run past about 99% of the enemies in this game and once I realized this I did just that for the whole game and I think there's only one instance where you're forced to fight enemies that aren't bosses.

This leads me to another problem, Soul Reaver tries to be a Metroidvania style game that puts you in the middle of a huge area and allows you to learn the ins and outs of the environment on your own. A good metroidvania should facilitate exploration with rewards to make going through it feel worth it and Soul Reaver doesn't do this. If you go out of your way to find hidden areas and rewards, you'll usually get 2 things. Either Glyphs that function as AoE attacks that drain a bit of your health or 1/5th of a health upgrade. Getting Glyphs feels Worthless since they only help with combat which you can almost entirely ignore here, that and they cost Health to use which means you lose your ability to use the wraith blade when activating them which is the way you kill enemies without relying on the environment. As for the health upgrades, it's a personal gripe of mine but I hate when games have you collect X amount of an item in order to get any benefit from it. It's just so lame when I find an item and think "Oh if I get 4 more of this I'll actually get something out of it". So with exploration that just doesn't feel worth it, I ended up just trying to get through the game's story without doing much else and that leads me to my biggest problem with this game, it's too damn big. It's so easy to get lost in this game with how huge it is and without having hidden items that make it worth it, it just leads to so much frustration. The amount of time I wasted aimlessly wandering around Nosgoth with no idea if I'm going in the right direction pissed me off to the point where I had to bust out a guide since I just wanted to get this game over with. I mentioned before how you can run past most enemies with no issue but the one enemy you'll be fighting throughout your entire playthrough will be the camera, oh my Lord it's so bad with how it's glued to Raziel's back and it often obscures the paths above you that you're meant to go to. What doesn't help is that the game has No map feature and the fast travel mechanic is so awkward to use. Each area is marked by this symbol that you use to identify which teleporter leads where and memorizing these is just needless busywork. I'm so baffled at how Blood Omen did all these things better, that game actually had a map feature with a fast-travel mechanic that was easy to comprehend and gave you more reason to explore since exploration there led to you getting items and permanent health upgrades that upgraded your health Immediately.

When you're not fruitlessly parading through Nosgoth's remains you're usually solving puzzles here. Some are pretty cool, I like the one where you ring bells in succession in order to break glass that lets you progress further or the one where you push pipes in order to allow for air to flow that you can use to hover up to your destination. Puzzles that rely on the gimmick of swapping between the real and spectral realm are also pretty enjoyable. But majority of the puzzles are just relegated to consisting of mindless block pushing, these aren't bad per se but surely they could've thought of something more interesting, this is just lazy. The bosses are also puzzles and they're hit and miss. Melchiah is pretty simple and fun, Zephon is even simpler but very fun and he's got a sick design that looks like something that H.R Giger would design, Rahab's bossfight requires platforming which is clunky as hell in this game but it's still decent and Dumah is just a worse version of the Melchiah boss with how tedious it can be to have him follow you. The real appeal of these bosses isn't in their levels or bossfights though, it's in finding out about their relationship with Raziel, how they feel about Kain's actions and how they metamorphosed and adapted to the changing climate all of which is done well but again, I wish we got more dialogue to flesh these things out.

Maybe I'm being a bit hyperbolic regarding some of its shortcomings, and there is some other stuff I like here such as the fact it loads in real time and therefore doesn't require loading screens which feels like an absolute Blessing after Blood Omen's stop and start gameplay and the music is once again really good. But still, the majority of the time I spent playing this game was me bored out of my mind waiting for it to be over. Soul Reaver is a real Paradox. I don't get how a game that's so light-years ahead of its time in terms of characters, narration and story-telling can be so dated and archaic in terms of almost everything else.