Soul Calibur IV review (PlayStation 3)

I really sure have learnt my lesson by now. After the Metal Gear Solid IV fiasco I should just give every obviously-popular game a 10 and not worry about the fanboy backlash. Soul Calibur 4, as another (kind of) fourth in the series definitely has some following, so the easiest thing to do would be to document what has changed, point out what characters are broken and complain about the abundance of online players choosing Vader, slapping a nice happy high score on the game to satiate fans.

Much like being out on the town with your mates, and rating girls out of ten (never done it), a 5/10 is not an ugly girl. She is average. Sure, you might prefer a nine or a ten, but after a few pints, if she (let’s call her Gemma) was the only single girl left in the club, you’d be hitting on her like a beat-em-up. Well perhaps not exactly like one, but you get the picture. Unfortunately for Gemma, there are plenty of great games around, and as such, if you can chuck 40 quid around, it’s just as easy to get a 10/10. Perhaps we should leave the girl analogy right there.

What about the game?

To clear things up, 5/10 has such a bad reputation because when you’re shelling out your hard earned cash for a piece of entertainment that should last you multiple hours (games this time), given the choice, you’ll always pick the better one, and while an average game can give some decent entertainment, from a bargain bin, or as a gift from your clueless granny, it’s a question of whether you feel that you would get value for money from the purchase.

If you like the Soul Calibur series, or indeed any fighting game, you’ll get your hours from Soul Calibur IV, and enjoy most of them, but it’s not the picture of revolutionary game design or culmination of everything good about the series. Back when I was at university, Tekken was our series. We’d be playing all of our spare time, sometimes making drinking games from challenges and tournaments, and while I dabbled in the Soul Calibur universe from its origins, it never really took over the house like Tekken.

Essentially its premise is a fighting game where each character wields a (sometimes enormous) deadly weapon and their own fighting style was limited very much to the weapon itself. I was drawn to it for this, and also the strange single player aspects to the game, especially considering I was unable to convince the rest of my house to join me for more than a few bouts. There was that strange RPG fare, and various other incarnations of the series, but this newest version seems a little lacking to me.

Multiplayer is where it’s at

Yes, playing against a human opponent of hopefully a similar level is the best way to get the most from a game. You won’t worry about AI players being able to pull any move out of their repertoire to defeat whatever you throw at them, and a fair game generally means a fun game. Now we’ve got an online mode which pleasantly works fine now, after a couple of patches, but even with a better than average connection to your opponent, you can feel the lag sucking out a lot of the skill.

That’s right, you’ll hit a button and be presented with a pause before your character reacts, negating much of the upper tier players from their winning streaks on a bad day. It’s a fair trade off to ensure you can play your opponents, but certain aforementioned fighting franchises have already managed a smoother feeling online battle.

So, you can’t get your mates over?

You’re naturally faced with an unimaginative Arcade mode, which is your standard seven fights in a row followed by the end boss, and a break down of your time and score in each stage. Very dull… Beaten easily by Story mode, which gives you a high definition next-gen text introduction for each character, and an acceptable, but hardly big budget in-engine formulaic ending.

Then there’s the more interesting Tower of Lost Souls mode which gives you 50 stages of ever more challenging battles with multiple opponents and tasks you with beating a set of them before replenishing any health. It’s made more interesting by the treasures, a series of unlockables which you’ll manage by performing a specific task within each floor. From simply throwing an opponent during the battle to winning without having any special skills equipped.

RPG characters?

A big recent pull for the Soul Calibur franchise has been the character creation features, and SC4 ropes in a load of them to give you plenty of chances to be creative, and then beat the crap out of someone else’s creativity. By choosing gender, general physique and the pre-made character to copy the fighting style of, you’ll have a base which you can build upon by buying various weapons, clothing, and accessories with the money you’ll automatically win through the other modes.

These items provide special skills and change your attributes to make you faster, hit stronger or all manner of other influences that can help or hinder you in battle. Skills can drastically alter the course of battle, if enabled, and can even prevent you being knocked out of the ring or automatically counter attack under certain circumstances. These can only be equipped up to the skill level of your character, a statistic that seems like the only real incentive to play each character for any length of time and quickly peaks to level nine. It seems a shame to me however, that you’re essentially only cloning the original characters and not offered any alternatives like the previous entry in the series.

Unlockables and troph… honours

It’s a fighting game, and naturally there are characters unavailable to choose from the outset, but unlike most, which give you a new character every time you beat story/arcade mode with a different one, this game lets you buy the separate characters to unlock them using the money easily earned from any mode. I had only used three characters by the time I had unlocked all but three of the rest, and that’s a lot of unknown faces to be presented with on the selection screen. It’s like the game is so excited by its features, it vomits them all over your TV to begin with and is so tired from the result that it just lets you do what you want with the result. Combine this with the step down in single player gameplay and it’s like they’ve simplified and overcomplicated the wrong parts.

Inbuilt to the game is a respectable award system called Honours, which is tied into the 360’s achievements, yet strangely missing from the PS3’s trophies. Sure they’re a relatively new feature to be released, but while not bothering to integrate them to the game from the outset is forgiveable, having no promise to patch the game to support them seems a little short sighted of Namco, especially since I’ve already had to grab two patches to play it.

So where does that leave us?

We’ve got a relatively traditional beat-em-up with plenty of well balanced characters, (Vadar may be fun to play, but his Apprentice was the only character I questioned when it came down to fairness,) with a few new features, including the critical finish system that lets you perform a less graphic Mortal Kombat style fatality on opponents that spend all of their time blocking, and a weak single player experience that even concluded with the end boss committing suicide and jumping out of the ring a couple of times.

A 2.5gb install is present, but thankfully it remains optional, available through the options menu, though it did noticeably speed up load times to such an extent that one on one battles seemed to occur instantaneously, although it took 15 minutes on my PS3, so it might be worth doing in a break of play, rather than at an excited start of first putting the disc in the drive.

Enjoy me

Soul Calibur IV is an engaging and well presented game (if you can excuse the terrible announcer introduction to each battle) but while it gives you a decent toolset to play with, it never coaxes you into experiencing the full potential of the game beyond slapping the content in front of you and asking you to have fun. When the entire battle system is so reliant on learning a good chunk of the moves for each character and knowing when best to use each one, it’s a shame that I never really felt like I should try all of the characters and fighting styles.

When one of your first choices in character creation is what fighting style to emulate, it means that players that want to jump into the statistic altering custom character creation mode may be stuck choosing a character to ‘main’ before really knowing what is on offer. Yes, there’s plenty to do here, but you’re really going to have to put in some effort to get the best experience back, and the game doesn’t incentivise it beyond the hope of improving your skills.