Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen 2

My review might be abit biased since this is one of my favorite games of childhood but i truly recommend playing it. It has good story, atmosphere and awesome voice acting. Great boss fights, which at least for me at the time was very hard but rewarding in the end.

First of all, if you want to get this running at all, make sure you're using the Re-Vamped mod, which has been done by the same people that made Soul Fixer for Soul Reaver 2. Whether you should try to get this running in the first place is a different matter, however. For both Crystal Dynamics and Eidos, Blood Omen 2 was little more than an afterthought, as evidenced by the fact that its story and setting largely contradict the games that came before it, and only its sequel, Defiance, was able to reconcile these differences. The plot itself is nowhere near the epic tale the previous games in the series told, and about the only interesting thing about it is the character of Kain himself, whose well-acted commentary adds a pleasant layer of malignancy to everything that happens. As for the actual gameplay, this was never the series' strength, and Blood Omen 2 is easily the low point in this regard. The puzzles are so simple that they do little but waste one's time, and the combat is tedious at best. Kain can do a basic 3-hit combo, and he can block, but only normal attacks, whereas stronger attacks go right through it. Unfortunately, Kain lacks proper tools to avoid these power attacks reliably, which is why you'll often be taking hits you shouldn't be taking, if the controls were more responsive. The combat loop basically amounts to blocking until the rage meter is filled, entering rage, repeat, until you get to see the bloodsucking animation, over, and over, and over again. The game never gets more interesting than that, and it is a far too long game for how boring it is. You walk a linear path, only broken up by the occasional (unskippable) cutscene, and that is it. What's worse, when I once again died to a power attack and loaded a checkpoint, the game freezed, which also deleted my entire progress. At that point, I've had enough, and decided to delete the game in retribution.

Once you make it past a menu that doesn't respond and require alt+tabing out of the game to run, you'll find a game that controls terribly and crashes regularly. The game and this series have a legacy (haha), but you're unlikely to be able to experience that. The game simply should not be on the storefront in its current state.

I understand that there are some errors when running old games, for example the first Soul Reaver lost some of its textures when Atl + Tab and Soul Reaver 2 had errors in the cinematic videos, however the problem with this game is that it crashes repeatedly in some parts, a shame because I expected to play the whole saga, but I think I will see the summary and jump directly to Defiance, maybe then I will try again in some emulator, to have a better experience. The game itself is larger than its predecessors, with different enemies and a much larger and more detailed world, however the protagonist's movement is a little rougher and the combat much less dynamic. It would be great if they could fix the bugs to give it a try in the future.

Sound seemed to have bugged out and it wont let me use ps4 controller