Soulcalibur IV
Review
Battle it out with... Yoda?
by T3HDX
reviewed on X360
Weapons
Like in Soulcalibur III, weapons have special abilities, such as increase health when causing damage and taking damage when you swing. A few of the old weapon abilities remain, instead a vast amount of new abilities are available, such as hyper mode and even invisibility.
Along with weapon special abilities, you may pick 3 additional abilities to be assigned to your weapon when creating a new character. These abilities include a range of different abilities, such as auto guard breaking, auto grapple breaking and absorbing health, and each have different levels in a letter ranking system. A new addition to the Soulcalibur series is the critical finish. This is where you relentlessly attack a guarding opponent, until their soul gauge shatters, causing your opponent to stumble. Then, with a specific button combo, you can perform a critical finish, something that has been seen in many games, such as the MK series.
Besides the weapons with special abilities, armour now takes a role in your battles. Armour used to be for show, now it has a purpose. Taking too many hits to one area will eventually cause your armour to break. There are three sections which can break: the head, torso and legs. With each piece that breaks, whatever is under the armour is revealed. It will also make your character take a bit more damage than before when being hit in that area.
Graphics and sound
The graphics have seen a vast improvement over the last instalment. They have been sharpened and made that little bit extra shiny for your visual pleasure. The character models are gorgeously done, with a high level of detail to their faces, equipment and weapons. The stages have been re-vamped as well, adding a lot more detail, with some incredibly beautiful backgrounds on some stages. Destructible environments are a new feature too. Landing on the ground hard will break it and being smashed into certain arena walls causes them to shatter.
The sound is truly top notch in Soulcalibur IV, with suiting music for each stage. I’m not one to pay much attention to music in fighting games, for two reasons. It’s either horrible and I can’t stand to listen to it, or it doesn’t do enough to stand out over the noise of the fighting.
Soulcalibur IV has a mix of some stage music blending perfectly with the stage. It gives a feeling of knowing it’s there, but you don’t pay any mind to it. There is also some fairly chaotic music that stands out and gives a great atmosphere for clashing with your opponent. The voice acting has been done fairly well too. On the vast majority of the characters, the general voice acting is done very well, with a few exceptions to some cheesy sounding dialogue and corny style voice acting.
Repetitious
Stability isn’t too bad in this game. Rare moments of single player lag crop up from time to time, where special moves are being made, or if the final hit to kill an opponent was done with a grab attack. Aside from this, the game runs incredibly smooth. With the graphical level as high as it is, such minimal game lag is quite amazing. Online play however does not receive such high marks, because of the horrible lag you can be forced to put up with in some matches against people outside of your country. Playing against people in Japan is ridiculous with a delay in your commands. Up to 4 seconds delay can ruin matches, with no way of compensating for it. Once one person is on the offensive, then that’s usually it.
Replayability is a little hit and miss on this title. The game is fairly repetitious. Fighting the same old characters in the same old modes over and over can become boring. But if you are the sort of person that strives for perfection, then this will have a lot to offer. However, the online play is an additional feature that will boost the longevity, especially once the lag problems are sorted.
Many hours
Overall this game is tremendous fun to play, in both single and multiplayer modes. It still feels like something is drastically lacking, compared to previous instalments. That hasn’t stopped me playing it as much as I have done, and still plan to play more still. It’s the sort of title that once you start playing and get good, it’s not one you want to put down, until your thumbs are too blistered. Soulcalibur IV will give you many hours of enjoyment, as well as many hours of frustration, but still remains to be one of my favourite games to play at the moment.
8.0
fun score
No Pros and Cons at this time
