Soul Calibur 4 review.
In a nutshell, this is a game to buy if you're a fan of the Soul series, and a hard core player.
Firstly the general: This is the first I've played that didn't have an adventure mode. The map crawling missions were removed, replaced with an "ascend/descend the tower" thing. In SC3, you had control of several characters who moved across a map, playing against the cpu trying to seize each other's base. There were great strategy elements to this, the ability to pile up your characters, retreat to heal, and bonuses based on the part of the map you're in. This is completely done away with in SC4, replaced with Ascend, in which you choose a floor, get 1-4 (usually 2) characters and must fight against up to 3 waves of strong enemies. Each floor has a "theme" like "Enemies who can't be ringed-out" or "Enemies who impact all attacks". I think this is a major downgrade, as it feels incredibly thrown together and not fun. Descend is more of a joke, it's just a rename of "Survival mode" and nothing more.
For the actual gameplay there was one nice addition that came at a price. The skills and stats feature is pretty fun, being able to create a custom character that automatically impacts, or can steal health. But the price of this is you must put together clothing of certain stats to get enough points to equip the skills. This leads to needing the most ridiculous equipment to get the skills you want, guys in bondage drag, girls in weird pirate samurai knight outfits, as most of the "Oh that's awesome!" armor gives points towards "Boost" and "Special" skills (Which I personally don't like... over the power, impact and guage skills)
Customization is further limited in that the custom classes are gone or unavailable for customizing, Vader, Apprentice, Yoda, and the custom girls's style can only be used by themselves, not your own create a souls, and styles like tambourine and foot are completely gone. In addition, all of the 1player hairstyles, voices, and outfits are unavailable, for whatever reason it was decided they didn't want you to dress up your incredible hulk Create a Soul in ivy's bondage gear. The downloadable content was really weak, other than holiday themed sets, they try and get you to pay for things that are easily unlockable in game.
The handling of the ai is a major improvement over soul calibur 3, which at times would be ridiculous. The new ai provides an at times controller-throwing level of difficulty, but you don't feel like you're being cheated by a prophetic ai like in SC3, instead it will beat you through sheer skill. Part of this is from the use of the Soul Gauge, a secondary "bar" (it's shown as an orb next to the hp) that goes down when you block attacks, and goes up when you land attacks or get hit. This gauge is designed to prevent "turtling" where the player/cpu relies on guards and grapple breaks to waste time, and is a great addition. Along with the soul gauge comes the critical finishes, a One hit kill against someone who was turtling until their soul gauge went empty.
SC4 is an average game, it removed a lot of good and bad things that were in SC3, making some major improvements and downgrades. The trade-off was not worth the sixty dollars, but used or heavily discounted would be worth it.
Also be warned that the special edition has a one-time use card for bonus content, this card is usually not included when you buy used or on ebay, so check the description carefully before buying it!Read full review
