Soul Calibur 4: Sequel Lite

Soul Calibur was released this week and as a die hard fan of the series I had to pick it up immediately. I got home with it and looked through the book a little, while eating dinner. The book looked pretty interesting but the play modes did not seem to have much depth to them. After dinner popped the game in the 360 and realized that what I had suspected from looking at the book was true. Story mode took me all of 15 mins to beat and ended with a very anti climatic 30 sec cutscene. For beating the game I got some gold. Repeat and rinse. I found that most of the endings follow this patern of being totally suck!. The endings with the most depth are those that have been written by the designers of the guest characters.

The game also offers the tower mode which is also a master of Average! The tower mode is supposed to encourage use of the character creation system which I will get to later. The basic idea is you go up the tower 60 floors, a few floors at a time. By fufilling extremely vague and sometimes excessively difficult tasks you are unable to unlock single pieces of armor at a time. You can also go down the tower in a mode that should have been called survival.

The only area that Soul Cal four feels like an actual sequel in is the character creation mode. Here you can design your own character choosing from many individual pieces of armor. Some armors even offer increases to point totals that can be used to equip skills. The skills at a low level help make up for short comings things like auto grapple break. At higher levels the skills become some overpowered you might as well let the computer control your character. It is to the point that some players may hurt their skills by using these huge assists.

In the end the game just doesn't feel like a sequel. Sure the graphics are a huge improvement, but gameplay changes are minor and feel almost hollow. Even still It's one of my favorite series and in not changing much it retains that same addictive vs. play that hooked me back in the arcade.

7 out of 10.