Soul Reaver 2 is the much-anticipated sequel to Crystal Dynamics' PlayStation masterpiece, Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver. The first game pushed the PSX to its limits, with huge environments and realtime plane-shifting without load times. Soul Reaver also featured a top-notch cinematic experience, with an excellent character-driven story and outstanding voice acting. Crystal Dynamics looks to continue these trends on Sony's new black monolith. A member of the Legacy of Kain series, Soul Reaver 2 tells the tale of outcast vampire-turned-hero Raziel seeking revenge against his former master Kain. The action picks up during the final battle of the original game, and links the two games together in the opening. After a brief summation of events and new plot points, players assume control of Raziel.

First of all, this game features superior voice acting. Each character has a distinct personality and each line is read extremely well. The dialogue itself is very well-written, and the readings succeed at creating the atmosphere the game is intending. No "fill your dark soul with light" crap here. I daresay that the voicing in Soul Reaver 2 is better than any other PS2 game, including Final Fantasy X and Metal Gear Solid 2, which is no small accomplishment. The dialogue gets a bit pretentious and heavy-handed at times, but the vampire chronicle that Crystal Dynamics presents is always interesting. To top it all off, the lip-synching is incredibly accurate. Crystal Dynamics has done an outstanding job animating the faces of each character as they speak. Lips stretch, tongues form vowels, eyelids open and close and eyebrows raise and lower. These are some of the most expressive faces I've ever seen, and they make the game feel that much more alive.

The visuals are excellent, and seem much improved over the demo released earlier this year. As is becoming the norm on PS2, the game features a nice edge-smoothing filter that eliminates most jaggies. The textures are extremely detailed and very high resolution, and there are very few instances where things look smeary. The environments boast an incredible amount of geometry, and the architecture is very impressive. There is some fade-in, so you can't see all the way to the horizon like you can in newer games like Jak and Daxter. The realtime plane-shifting feature looks better than ever, as pillars twist and bend as you switch from the material realm to the spectral one. Curiously, it's not used nearly as much as it was in the original, which is quite a shame. Overall the game looks very nice, and stacks up well against the top games on the PS2.

If you've played the original Soul Reaver, then the combat will feel very familiar to you. You can lock on to the nearest foe with R1, and you can strafe, dodge and do light and heavy attacks. When weakened, enemies can be finished off with a killing blow, usually an impalement or decapitation. Souls are devoured as in the original, and are necessary for keeping up Raziel's strength. The soul reaver blade now saps Raziel's power if used for too long, so you can't use it indiscriminantly. Also, the blade eats the souls of enemies you kill with, so you don't want to rely on it all the time. Luckily there are lots of nasty weapons laying around, so you can hack up enemies with swords, spears, axes and staves. There's plenty of gore, as you can cleave enemies in two or slice their heads clean off. Enemies will usually gang up on you, but in true bad guy fashion, only one will attack you at any one time. If you're killed in the material world, you'll simply revert back to the spectral realm. Die there and you're set back to the last checkpoint you passed.

The environments are large and detailed, featuring detailed locales such as a gothic stronghold, a murky swamp and snow-covered mountains. The game involves travelling through different time periods, and traversing the same areas in those different eras. While it is interesting to examine the changes that these landscapes endure in different time periods, traversing the same areas over and over again gets to be a bit repetitive after a while. There are only a handful of areas to explore, and each is more of a straightforward corridor that limits the amount of exploration you can do. The game also feels much smaller than the expansive Soul Reaver, as you can literally run from one end of the game world to the other in just a few minutes. I didn't get lost at all in Soul Reaver 2, but at the same time the sense of exploration presented in the first game is all but gone here. A pity.

The puzzle design in Soul Reaver 2 is fairly straightforward, and much less cumbersome and esoteric than that found in the original game. Puzzles are limited to the various Forges and strongholds, and most involve the strategic use of the various elemental powers in Raziel's Soul Reaver blade. Most often you'll be using a combination of the Dark, Light, Aerial and Fire reavers to activate switches and open paths. Gone are the baffling block puzzles of the original game, replaced with more digestible fare like light-reflecting puzzles and elemental reaver mindbenders. These new puzzles are complicated and require some thought to solve, but they feel more intuitive; I only had to resort to a guide on a few occasions. As a result the game is much more fun to play than the original, at least in terms of puzzle-solving.

While the game was delayed several times, apparently this extra time was not spent troubleshooting. There are a number of bugs and glitches present in the game, some annoying, some downright crippling. The most notorious of these is the Dark Forge door glitch, in which you become permanently trapped in the Dark Forge due to a malfunctioning door. I experienced this bug firsthand, and I lost about two hours worth of puzzle solving. This is not the type of thing I expect to find in a completed product that I payed fifty dollars for, and I'm very disappointed that Eidos chose to release the game in this unfinished state. In addition, the game is quite a bit shorter than the original Soul Reaver, clocking in at only around fifteen hours. Perhaps the streamlined puzzles are to blame, as they require much less time to solve. Still the game feels a bit too short for a story-driven adventure game.

Soul Reaver 2 is one of the first games (PS2 or otherwise) to feature the type of extras typically seen on movie DVDs. The disc features production notes, conceptual artwork, a timeline that ties all of the games and events together, and developer and voice actor profiles. It even features the excellent opening movie from the first Soul Reaver, in case you forgot what happens. My favorite segments are the voice recording sessions. Crystal Dynamics uses established Hollywood voice talent (Michael Bell, Simon Templeman), and it's fun to see them reading the dialogue from the game. There are even a few "candid" sessions, with the actors talking about their roles and the game itself. It's obvious from watching these that video games are still seen as fun little diversions by most people, instead of the ever-expanding art form they are. I laughed upon hearing Michael Bell explain that it took him 2 hours to navigate Raziel out of a hole! I'd love to see this type of material on every game I purchase, but this a great start.

Overall, I'm fairly impressed with Soul Reaver 2. The story and acting are compelling, while the redesigned puzzles are more manageable and less frustrating than the original Soul Reaver. A few bugs and glitches hold the game back a bit, and the game is unusually short, which might limit its appeal for some. But if you like a good gothic vampire story, Soul Reaver 2 is definitely worth checking out.