51. Legacy of Kain: Defiance - PC
Remember how I said I was looking forward to this game? Now I'm just glad it's over. I am shocked by how disappointed I was in this game. And the worst part is that the story was still really really good; even ignoring my unwillingness to concede defeat I was definitely going to play this all the way through to see that story. This, at least, wraps up the plot threads that had been running through the Soul Reaver games. There is still an important story to tell, but I doubt we'll ever see it; the antagonist of that future story's voice actor died, and he was so distinctive that I doubt anyone would try and fill his shoes.
So why is Defiance so disappointing? Someone fucked up the gameplay severely. The two Soul Reaver games were puzzle platformers with some combat; it was terrible combat in the first one but you could basically always avoid it, the second one made the combat serviceable and it was mostly avoidable, but in the end sequence you were forced into fights to progress and it bogged down a bit. In this one they got an actually good combat engine, and their reaction was to go "great! now let's make the game have ALL the combat." The problem being, it's not a good enough combat engine to make it worthwhile. The game is full of forced fights for no other reason than to justify the time they spent on the combat engine. Hell, there are a bunch of boss fights that consist of you just whacking on them and trying to dodge their attacks (and frequently failling). If they had retained the amount of combat from the first game or the first half of the second game it would have been great. But this was jsut an execrise in tedium.
But the really bad part is that they cut down the puzzles to almost nothing (barring one really poorly done level that was a long series of find the keys with tons of backtracking that wasn't obvious you needed to do) and changed the camera. While the Soul Reaver games used the standard behind the back camera with the ability to pan it around you, this game goes with the fixed but dynamic camera that was seen in Final Fantasy X; this is where you are moving on screen with a fixed camera, but as your round corners and such the camera will move with you. This leads to you needing to adjust your inputs as it happens, as all the inputs are camera relative. And this was fine with FFX, because it was a JRPG. This is an action platformer; I can't tell you how many times I miffed a jump because the camera was fucking with me. And what makes it better are the number of times where you create platforms for a limited time, and the time requirements are tight. The camera and the camera relative controls end up being the thing that causes you to miss most of those. Also, I ended up finding a lot of times it very hard to determine if I was going to make a jump or not because of the camera position; if I was above the horizon then I lost all sense of my position relative to the ground. I'd love to interview the dev team sometime and find out how they decided to switch to this style camera over the very successful one in the previous games.
If you really liked the first two Soul Reaver games then you should definitely snag this one to finish up the plot arc. But be prepared for a lot of frustration in the gameplay. Enough of the story is told as part of the gameplay that you can't just watch a cutscene compilation on youtube.
