The two remarkable games of Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver I & II Remastered | Review

A classic brought back to life

The Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver compilation brings two single-player games, both RPGs, offering a classic experience with some improvements compared to the original titles, released approximately 25 years ago for PlayStation 1, Dream Cast, and PC.

These are two games focused on complementary campaigns, with various puzzles, combat mechanics involving the environment, as well as thematic scenarios. Despite receiving considerable improvements compared to the original titles, it still delivers a very rustic experience of what a classic game is, with its main highlight being the graphical improvements introduced.
 

Following in the footsteps of its predecessor

Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver I & II Remastered brings a very interesting story, even by today's standards of cinematic games. Although it is a game "punished by time" in terms of how well it has aged, the story is still quite cool. We control Raziel, a vampire who was punished and cast into the underworld by Kain, his former master, where he remained for centuries until being resurrected by The Elder God, gaining the ability to move between the Spectral and Material realms and receiving the mission to become a Soul Reaver and eliminate Kain.

With that said, the story unfolds in a linear manner, telling the story through cinematics and dialogues, with various areas to be explored through glyphs. Despite its age, it has a very immersive setting with gothic buildings and monsters.

With this context, we progress, solving puzzles, resulting in a considerably long campaign, encompassing both games in the package and being quite intense, providing good hours of entertainment, immersion, and a lot of frustration.



The combat stuck in time

As I mentioned, the game sought to incorporate aspects that bring a better quality of life for the player. The most evident point is the support for controllers in the PC version, as well as improvements in the interface and menus.

However, the combat of the game is easily its most negative aspect, having remained stagnant for 25 years, as it is practically the same as the original title, a mix of beat 'n' up and hack and slash, which is very strange to get used to at first.

It is important to note that the difficulty of the game is relative. Players accustomed to classic games with archaic mechanics will have a much smoother learning curve than players like me. During my experience, everything was quite punishing, not in the sense of dying constantly, but in getting used to all the presented challenges.

There is an interesting aspect of combat that I found very interesting: enemies can be defeated using tools from the environment, such as fire and stones, which is closely related to the universe's story since enemies are often vampiric, and fire and light harm them lethally. So many times direct combat, which is quite basic, can be avoided simply by leading enemies to specific points and letting the game take care of them.

The universe of Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver I & II Remastered is definitely not new in the gaming world, which brings back many fans to the franchise and introduces this work to new generations. What I noticed is that the gameplay of the game reminded me a lot of the early Tomb Raider games since the recipe is basically the same. It is evident that efforts were made to modernize the players' experience, such as the controller support I mentioned earlier, widescreen capability, graphical improvements that do not discard the essence of the game, but unfortunately, are limited to that, as the rest is practically identical. 



A release that may go unnoticed by the mainstream media

Playing Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver I & II Remastered was an interesting experience. Games like this have a great capacity for immersion, especially due to the storytelling, which is truly a unique aspect, as well as the adaptive soundtrack, which has been present since its release. Practically everything in this game was enjoyable for me, except for the combat, as I have mentioned several times in this review.

The game has a surprising art direction, despite the graphic style being maintained. It is not such a huge generation shock, so you can still be enchanted in the same way. After all, graphics are just complements to what makes a game good.

The game, in general, is not easy to play. Honestly, the not-so-modern mechanics and graphics can deter many players, especially because it relies heavily on how the story is told, despite having well-worked tutorials. All aspects of the game punish you, but not enough to make you give up. An interesting point I observed is that the games have different saving systems, which can be confusing and may end up causing a lost save, but it is something that is easy to get used to. 

The game is localized in several languages, has great overall voice acting, although it does not have any text or voice in Brazilian Portuguese, like the PC version that was released in 1999, which I believe is a cool addition to cater to the audience.

The game's performance is quite smooth, as it is an old title with a layer of makeup on top, it is very easy to achieve high frame rates, and the controls and menus, despite being simple to configure, I don't think there is a real need for it, whether playing with a controller or keyboard and mouse.

Reviving classics

My experience with Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver I & II Remastered was enjoyable in most aspects, such as immersion, narrative quality, and audio, but it was not so good in terms of combat and project age limitations, as I mentioned.

Anyway, the game as a whole brought me good hours of fun and frustration, with a positive highlight once again for the setting. 

The game offers a standard quality of life for the time and reasonable for modern standards, has a complete interface with resource and direction indicators, but has "messy" menus, with various things written in a very small space, but nothing that would harm the game experience.



For this review, the game was experienced on PC using the Steam platform. I am immensely grateful to Aspyr for providing the access key.