I'm going to sound really bitter here. I know. I don't want to be that guy but I feel I have to.
Some of my favourite games like Half-life and Sonic Adventure get attacked all the time for having "Aged like ****!"
I disagree. They may not have aged perfectly but as some one who played both games long after their first release I can say they are genuinely great on their own merits.

But you know a game that never gets attacked for having aged badly? Not even a little. [Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver.
Again, I did not play this game when it came out. I played Half-life for the first time in 2012. I tried to play Legacy of Kain for the first time in 2014. And I simply cannot enjoy it. It makes me cry with longing for Prince of Persia: The Sands of time or other third-person action games that have mouse control or at least a good camera.



Let me get the positives out of the way. I'm not going to pretend it's worthless.
The story and world are amazing. I can'r think of anything else like it. It's a blend of gothic, grunge, Lovecraftian and psychedelic that feels like nothing before it or since.
The voice acting as incredible. Tony Jay as the lord of the underworld is a total joy. And it's all the more remarkable for having come out at a time when voice action it video games tended to sound like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8UBnR3AWuo or even this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtTfptkUgj0
And the design and artwork has had a huge amount of love poured into it. Whatever you want to say about this game it's clear the art department really went above and beyond.
And the sound design and music are also pretty cool.

The problem with Legacy of Kain is the "game" part of the game. The game varies from dull to almost unplayable.
Combat is lacklustre at best. A dull button masher that takes too long to kill anything. But at it's worst it's a bad joke. Almost half the enemies require a mini-cut scene execution that slows the pace down to a crawl.
And all enemies drop health for which another mini-cut scene is needed to pick it up. And you're vulnerable to other enemies while you do this. In Doom killing a basic enemy and picking up health can be done on 1.5 seconds. In LoK it normally takes 15 seconds. Maybe longer. I've never played a game where seeing new enemies has made my heart sink so much.
And while you have a lock-on mechanic The camera doesn't lock on as well. So you can literally not know where your enemy is when he's right in fromt of you. Or even not be able to see your charater when fighting because the camera is stuck behind a wall.
And the grap and throw mechanics are so slow and clunky that it doesn't feel worth it unless you are forced to.
And to make it extra unbearable enemies respawn all the time. Making combat pointless. You can just try to out run the enemies but if ignoring the enemies is the best way to play then why even have them in the game? A good action game makes you fight your foes. And a good action game should make you want to fight. If combat is a pointless chore then it should not be in the game at all.

Then there's the camera.
I know LoK is from a time when 3D games were going through some nasty growing pains and a lot of games hadn't figured out how to make the camera work. But this game is begging for mouse support.
The camera is a greater threat to you than most of the enemies. You can literally go off screen because the camera can't follow you. and it has this odd impact on your movement so you can't always be sure if pressing forward will send you forward or sideways.
And it makes platforimg a chore as you constantly have to stop to look around with the zoom button to figure out where to go. And sometimes a platform you have to get to is so high up you can't see it. So you just have to guess where to jump or use a walkthorugh.
The environments are maze-like. So not being able to see things easy makes the simple task of getting around a guessing game. It feels like I'm fighting the game itself.

And then there are the puzzles. Are they easy or hard? I'm honestly not sure because the awkward movement and lousy camera make playing the game so frustrating that any puzzle that spans more than one room takes ages to complete even if you know what to do.
The harder puzzles, often complete with repawning enemies, take so long that the hard part is normally figuring what I'm meant to do rather than doing it. Which for me at least is not fun at all.
And Shifting between the realms of the living and the dead is another thing that takes too long to be fun. Prey had a similar mechanic and they boiled it down to one button press. It was as smooth as silk. In LoK shifting into the realm of dead takes is slow and clunky and returning to the land of the living is even more finicky. It's just not fun. I swear that if you ironed out all the combat, camera and shifting kinks the game would be 50% shorter.

And to cap it off the save system is so strange that at first I thought it didn't work. Again I know this game is from a time where console games had trouble with these things. But surely they could have come up with something better than sending you back to the starting area. Teleporting back to the vauge general area you where in. And retracing the your steps back to where you left off. It makes the game up after leaving it for a few weeks nearly impossible because you wont's remember where to go.



The reason why I bring all this up is because I started playing Blood Omen 2 recently. And it has none of the problems I mentioned. LoK came out in 1999. Blood Omen 2 came out in 2002. In three years this franchise went from unplayable to pretty decent.
Again I'm not Saying that Legacy of Kain is a bad game or that people are dumb for liking it. But as someone who didn't grow up with it I feel it's aged so badly from a gameplay perspective that I just can't get into it. No matter how hard I try.
And I would like to. I can see why people love it so much. But the fact is I'm so used to 3D action games the play so much better than this. Be they mouse and keyboard affairs like Prince of Persia or Enclave or keyboard only games like Sonic generations or even the original Alone in the Dark. It feels like a relic from a time when people didn't fully know how to make games like this. And that if I'd grown up with this game like most of it's fans I would be able to look past it's flaws. But I can't.
It's a shame. I love playing older games that I wasn't there for. I've been playing a bunch of old Sega Genesis games on my PC. Vectorman. Shinbi III. Sonic 3. Comix Zone. Streets of Rage and Gunstar Heroes. And I've been loving them. Old games can still be fun even for newbies like me. (Seriously. Vectorman is Badass,)


Agree, disagree or just want to talk about the games other merits and flaws? Let me know. And thanks for reading.

I dunno. I started playing the Dreamcast version a few days ago, and it seemed good. I mean, the combat is pretty simple compared to more modern action games, but it's not really the point of the game. I think it works well for what it's trying to do.

The PC port was kinda shitty, though. I'm not sure how much that impacted your experience with it.

Who knows? I'd have to compare the two, That said. Earthworm Jim 1's GOG port is apparently pretty bad while EW2's port is meant to be closer to the console. And of those two games. I do find I enjoy 2 a lot more. So you might be onto something.

I think they do it indirectly by not talking about it at all.

Nah. That's not it. This series has a smallish but very vocal and passionate fanbase. And They don't mind calling out the faults in other games in the series.

Well i know the game was built based on the PS1, and graphically it hasn't aged well, this is true. On the other hand the game is otherwise really good, so if the meshes/textures got a upgrade the game would look really really good.

Still the resolution you play at is another thing to consider. Soul Reaver was made more or less to play at 640x480, and at that resolution it still looks fairly okay. However once you go up, the flaws in the lower quality assets really start to show it self.

This is where i really wish games didn't lock down their files and formats where we couldn't update it, since we could easily update with a patch or update; Even if you're taking models and meshes from the later games where they have the updated Raziel and Kain. The videos on the other hand, well can't do much about those :P

Honestly I don't mind the older graphics. They add to the game's feeling of other-worldliness. Sometimes old graphics look better than new stuff.
LoK had fairly standard graphics for the time but I'm okay with that as long as I can run it in a modern resolution. Which in this case I can :)

Well I certainly mind the older graphics. I want an upgrade. Although I don't want a realistic full blown redo, I just want PS2 level or something, where it looks decent and retains it's old roots without trying too hard to be hip. I want it to look nice enough, that looking at a boss doesn't look like sponge bob squarepants with a texture slapped on it.

With exception of the controls, I think it has aged well. But that's just me.

Well, there's a reason why it's small.

I don't think I had heard anyone mention this game in years. As opposed to other games that have aged badly, like Goldeneye, and people never tire of bringing up.

I played this game on the PS, and the issues you are having with controls are only for keyboard and mouse. The PS gamepad worked just fine.

As far as I can tell there is no mouse control on the PC version. Just the keybord. Then again I'm Playing Blood Omen 2 with just the keyboard has well and it works great.

I think the game works fine with a keyboard. The controls don't need that much effort to care about mouse control.

A lot of 90's 3D games have a tendency of aging poorly. They were still experimenting a lot and in that kind of situation you hit some, but also miss quite a bit.

My kingdom for an easier control scheme!