Soul Calibur IV

Story 8/10

What I like about the Soul Calibur series is that they make a lot of effort developing their characters with background and history. Each character has their own back story and alignment depending on whether their intentions are good or evil.

Completing story mode with each character unlocks additional character biographies. What I like even more about this is that the game makes it completely optional as to whether or not you chose to read these additional stories or not.

Picture 7/10

Soul Calibur also wins points for how pretty everything looks. The character designs are great and they have even gone into exceptional detail with the extra weapons and equipment you can buy, each of which are beautifully designed.

The lever designs are also brilliant and some have destructible elements as well.

Sound 7/10

Now, I know what I said about Japanese companies and music in my Pro Evolution review, however the music in Soul Calibur is very fitting to the game. It didn’t come across as repetitive at any point despite the many hours I put into achieving 100% and I wasn’t driven to brain-suicide as before.

I think the main reasons for this are that it has a soundtrack with different music each time you play and the fact that you are actually playing the game while the music plays. The menu music is the same but instead of having the horrible J-Pop sound, it actually feels like you are building up to an epic battle.

Gameplay 8/10

I’m not really a massive player of fighting games however, I have liked the fluid combat in the Soul Calibur series since the days of Soul Calibur II. It feels a lot less clunky than a lot of other beat-em-up games and they always have a few varied game modes to keep you entertained.

Story Mode was a bit of a letdown though. Each character has five rounds to get through and even though they try to frame it around the individual character’s stories, it feels very thin in places; probably because there are 33 individual characters. Also it feels like more effort was put in to some of the more central figures from the series. For example, Kilik has a fight with someone called Xianglian and it’s kind of a big deal because he calls her by name before the fight. This doesn’t happen with any of the other characters.

The Tower of Souls is a little different and, in my opinion, the main challenge in the game. You have to fight your way up 60 stories of the Tower with variable challenges along the way. You get extra items for meeting specific criteria and it was very good at avoiding the easy trap of having a repetitive fighting game.

The online play it as expected, you have to fight other people in best of five matches. It does what it says on the tin and doesn’t try to be overly complicated, so as far as gameplay goes, it’s a tick in the box from me.

Achievements – 1,000 points – 50 Achievements

There are 50 achievements and it terms of variation, they have definitely gone all out. It almost feels like they have used the achievements to draw out the gameplay and this is something I do not have a problem with... to a certain extent.

There are two issues I had with these 50 achievements:

Issue number one; online achievements. I’m working on catch up so I played the online stuff after Soul Cailbur V was released. This meant that I was finding it very difficult to get matches. After about 3 weeks of trying unsuccessfully, I got a boosting partner to help me. However, for some bizarre reason as soon as we started boosting, every other person still playing Soul Calibur IV decided to show up, which of course led to more abusive messages coming into my inbox – voice messages this time too!

Issue number two; the Transcend History and the World achievement. As I said earlier, I don’t really go in for fighting games, probably because I’m not that good at them. However this achievement requires you to buy every item of equipment and all the weapons in the game. As I'm not very good, this meant it took me a lot longer with a lot more playing time than other people who were better than me, which means I would have naturally accumulated more gold than I would have if I had done everything first time. Despite this, I managed to get the other 49 achievements but still had to play the same stuff over and over again to get the required money to purchase the rest of the weapons. I think it was about 5 hours of grinding that was not that enjoyable.

Downloadable Content – N/A

I stand by the fact that Soul Calibur is one of the best fighting games series out there, but from an achievements point of view, it’s not an easy work through and the last achievement makes it feel like more of a slog than a reward. That said it is definitely doable and well worth cracking out again with friends on a rainy day.