Speaking of which, there are many different ways to exterminate the vampires of Soul Reaver. You can set them on fire, throw them into water, impale them with stakes, and toss them onto spikes. Destroying vampires regularly is necessary early on in the game because you'll eventually revert to the Spirit Realm if you don't eat enough souls. That is, until the Soul Reaver itself comes into play. The Soul Reaver is a blade that appears as a thin blue energy trail that curls around your right arm from the shoulder and extends a few feet down past your hand. Swallowing enough souls summons it to the Material World, where it sustains you, keeping you from having to constantly hunt down vampires to feed on. Once you gain the Soul Reaver, you'll shatter enemies with an explosive punch that mixes Psylocke's psi-dagger (from Marvel Comics' X-Men) with a Jedi lightsaber. While poking vampires with stakes can get a bit tired after awhile, this never gets old.
As this extensive description may suggest, Soul Reaver is a deep game possessed of myriad impressive little touches. The graphics are among the best we've seen on the Dreamcast, taking as much advantage of the power of the system as the original version did of the PlayStation. While it was stunning before, the environments and characters possess a level of clarity and definition far beyond what we saw on the PlayStation Soul Reaver. As before, the game has subtle lighting effects that color each scene just a little differently to the scale and the overall jaw-dropping look of its polygonal 3D world. The Drowned Abbey stage is an excellent example of both elements. Standing midlevel in a half-flooded church, you'll look down at water pulsing gently above a tiled floor. When you gaze upward, you'll see the reflection of the water shimmering across an ornate gothic ceiling. Meanwhile, Raziel himself is modeled so well that you'll find yourself turning the camera around to get a good view of him posing with the Soul Reaver or pulling down his scarf to expose the gaping maw where his mouth used to be. The storyline is presented through a gorgeous introductory CG cinema (which runs even smoother on the Dreamcast), which is then followed by well-crafted events using the in-game engine and superb voice work. It's all wonderful high drama, with much less of the overstated breathy gothness found in Blood Omen. An excellent, albeit looping, soundtrack only adds to this and picks up whenever things get intense. The camera controls for the PlayStation version of the game were admittedly a little better than those on the Dreamcast edition. They followed the route of Spyro the Dragon and Gex 3: Deep Cover Gecko (more the former than the latter), letting you pan the area you're viewing with a press of the R2 or L2 button. Since there are only two "shoulder" buttons on the Dreamcast controller, this functionality has been relegated to the DC d-pad, which is unfortunately placed under the analog control. In the end, though, while worth noting, it doesn't hold the game back. You quickly get used to holding both triggers (the look function) to quickly turn Raziel, which, while less elegant, works nearly as well.
As in the PlayStation version, the level of frustration resulting from dealing with the camera is about equal to that found in Rare's Banjo-Kazooie - which is to say, close to none. Also similar to Banjo-Kazooie is that Soul Reaver takes place in such a huge game world that it's sometimes hard to figure out where to go next. There are gates that teleport you from area to area, but the stations are represented by strange designs - rather than simple text - that are impossible to remember.
While it feels as if Crystal Dynamics set out to make a game that was not as difficult as the Tomb Raider series but not as simple as Metal Gear Solid, Soul Reaver does come off a bit on the easy side. The platform-jumping sections aren't too tough, the puzzles not too complex, and the bosses fairly simple to beat. You can ignore the basic cadre of vampires once you have the Soul Reaver, and there are perhaps too many occasions where you're required to move blocks around. It is an extremely solid game, however, that's as much of an experience as it is an adventure, and its warts (the difficulty level and an ending that's abrupt to the point of making Silent Hill's finale seem complete) are few. After beating it, you'll want to go back and get all the glyphs (even though you'll find few instances to use the powers they provide), and you'll learn that having picked them all up doesn't alter the ending. You'll still just want to play it a little more.
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