Aug 25 2008
Soul Calibur IV Review
So now that I’ve had some time to spend with this game I thought I would type up my impressions of it. First, I should state that I was really looking forward to this game. While I never played the 3rd iteration of this game I was a huge fan of the 2nd. At my old job we played it every morning and afternoon break for about a year and a half. That’s a LOT of time to play one game but it never got old. I never had a PS2 so I ended up skipping Soul Calibur 3. Besides, without any online capability and no one to play with in real life I wasn’t really interested. Then I heard about IV and not only was it coming out on the Xbox 360, but it would also support Live multiplayer! Needless to say I was excited. As the release date got closer I began reading up more and more on the game and watching game play videos. All of this was just whetting my appetite. I couldn’t get the game right at release but, a couple of weeks ago; I finally got my sweaty little hands on it.
As I sat down to play the first time I started playing the Story Mode. My first goal was to unlock all of the characters. This was fairly easy, even on Hard difficulty. The story is short and sweet. Assuming you get through all of the fights on your first try you can be complete one characters story in about 10 minutes. I only play through a few of the characters, enough to get all of the unlockables. Of the stories I played through some were better than others. However, none of them would be considered anything close to spectacular. To be honest, I can’t understand why they even had a story mode to begin with. I much preferred the way they did it in Soul Calibur 2.
Having unlocked all the characters I entered the Tower of Lost Souls. In this mode you can ascent 60 floors or descend 25 or 30 floors. The option to Descend doesn’t unlock until you defeat the 20th floor while ascending. Each option plays differently. Descending you pick 2 characters and see how far down you can get before both characters are KO’d. So far I’ve only been able to get down to floor 7 but every 5 floors you descend you unlock an item. Ascending is a little different. Each floor, or set of floors depending, you get to pick 2 or 3 characters. The goal here is to defeat every floor in the set in order to unlock the next set of floors. This, in itself, isn’t so bad. The catch while ascending is that each floor has an unlockable if you meet the certain criteria to unlock it. Some of these are relatively easy such as “block 5 times in a row” or “get a ring out”. Others are frustratingly difficult if not downright impossible unless you get extremely lucky. It’s not like all the really hard unlockables are on the top floors either. The first one I ran into was on floor 7 where the requirement to unlock the item is to not miss, not once! To further complicate this you’re fighting against an AI that has 200% health, speed buffs, and ringout protection! I’m all for a challenge but this is just downright ridiculous! Other levels that I have to yet to unlock the item on include floor 10 where you have to block 10 times in a row against an opponent that doesn’t like to attack much, and floor 15 where you have to get a 5 combo. That last one is no doubt just my lack of ability but I’ve only been to floor 23, I can only imagine what frustrations are left.
The other thing I found lacking is the training mode. Unless someone is intimately familiar with all the lingo there’s just not enough for a noob to tell them how to do certain moves. For example, what qualifies as a “counter” and what is a “just input”? While training mode has lots of options there’s one feature I feel should have been included and that’s something similar to what DoA had, an option to run through all the moves one by one. This was a great way to practice moves in DoA and should be standard in all fighting games.
This brings us to Live, the primary reason for all of my excitement. Prior to purchasing the game I’d heard that the lag could be pretty bad unless you had a perfect connection. Sadly, even if you have a connection of 5, the lag can still be pretty painful and don’t even try to play with less than that! With a connection of 4 or lower there is an increasingly noticeable delay from when you input a command to when it actually happens on screen. This pretty much nullifies your ability to block, guard impact, throw, attack, or sometimes even move. To a lesser extent this can happen even with a 5 connection. Even without the lag issues online play can be just downright annoying. Most battles consist of fighting a player who uses the same two or three attacks over and over again; attacks that, even if you block, do not give you enough time to attack back. So your options are to either block the whole match or be pummeled mercilessly. Occasionally you will fight someone who is actually skilled and those games are a lot of fun. It’s just unfortunate that those matches are few and far between, especially when limited to only those games with minimal lag.
Graphically this game shines and the animations are SMOOTH! I rarely saw any slowdown and when I did it was very minor. All in all though this game has been a pretty huge disappointment and I wish I could get my money back on it. It would probably be a different story if I had a group of friends I could huddle around the TV with and play like in the old days. If you have this ability and enjoy fighting games then I wholeheartedly would recommend this as the Soul Calibur series is, in my opinion, the best fighting games by far. However, if you’re like me and you play 360 alone on the couch in a dark living room and your only interaction with other people is over Xbox Live, then you’d be better off punching yourself in the face repeatedly than depending on this game for entertainment.
