Legacy of Kain: Defiance

When thinking about the series, I am sort of baffled by the fact that all of those games (barring maybe BO1) had some... pretty annoying flaws. Mostly having to do with the camera and controls, but sometimes also the overabundance of combat. But you know what? The beautiful thing is that the story and the characters were good enough and engaging enough that I wanted to play more of those games anyway. The combat was... eeeeh. Kinda enjoyable at first – nice, flashy animations, a lot of jumping around and stabbery. But it quickly got rather tiresome – and to be honest, that’s my criticism about EVERY SINGLE GAME IN THE SERIES. I think there could be less combat. I guess I should at least give Defiance credit for giving you experience and new combos for defeating enemies, but it’s hard for me to appreciate because I absolutely sucked at executing those combos and mostly just did them by accident. xD At first, right after finishing Defiance, I felt it wasn’t really... that great as a final game. But then I got it. It’s THE EXACT POINT. This is a game about Fate and about fighting Fate – and I guess Defiance can be understood as making particular points on those subjects that are actually kinda interesting. The character creation of Kain is brilliant overall. In fact, I’d say the whole series was maybe worth playing JUST FOR HIM. I loved his haughtiness, his flowery turns of the phrase as he derided peasants or waxed poetically about torture and death. He seemed to me an almost shakespearean character, reciting his lines with a charisma and emphasis worthy of a stage play. Overall, I’d say my final ranking of the games would be: Blood Omen 1 > Soul Reaver 2 > Defiance > Soul Reaver 1 > Blood Omen 2 If you'd be interested in seeing how I tackled Defiance blind, you can see a playthrough on my youtube channel, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YL7Ci5v-RMY&list=PLp4TpsJ7HUWVBj2WiWSK-4Jtg_xUCz4RG

I have played this game a long time ago and now that I have replayed it I have to admit that I have remembered better. Back then, I thought that this is the best part of the series - now I would say that this is the worst, but it does still worth playing. As the third Soul Reaver game this is the most combat oriented which might be a plus or minus based on personal preference. The save and checkpoint system is much better than in the previous installments. Unlike SR2 this gme recognized my gamepad and I was saved from the mouse+keyboard combination and I was quite happy about that because even with the gamepad the controls were still a bit awkward. The camera handling is the worst in the series and now that I am thinking about it, as the graphics became better and better in the sequels the camera handling became worse and worse. The game is also buggy (e.g. enemies hitting through the walls but no chance to hit back, dying without any reason with full health bar, simply quit to windows, etc). There were some cases when some key items were "nonresponsive", I could not activate them and had to restart the level to progress. This time the story is also a little bit meh, mainly because of the middle part of the game when the main characters have to explore the vampire citadel where basically nothing happens story wise and the levels themselves are quite monotonous and boring. Of course, the game has some quite interesting areas as well like Vorador's Mansion which is my favorite in the entire series. Overall, the game could be excellent, but due to its flaws, it is just simply "not bad".

I absolutely loved both Kain and Soul reaver games back in the PSone/PS2 era, but for some reason I missed this one completely. So what a nice surprise it was to find it here with a brilliant discount and bought it to wait for the perfect day, so I could merge myself into this game's dark fantasy world. I read some reviews here and there, got the impression that the camera is not very good... "SO WHAT!" -I thought to myself. "How bad could it be to play this with keyboard and mouse, it can't be that BAD?" Yes it can. Believe the warnings from the other reviews. No matter how well you map your controls to fit your playstyle, it doesn't matter. The camera screws your jumps up most of the time and combined with instant death places, the game is just pure frustration. The amount of camera-stuttering made me nauseous on the first hour and trying to find the character in a hectic fight situation is pure pain +the traps that the camera hides all the time when entering rooms. This game was meant to play with a controller and it is just mind-boggling how this game passed any tests before being released on pc -if there was any. I'm off to watch how this game ends from youtube, because I really want to know. Too bad that they didn't give a s*it about their own game, it could've been good with a decent camera. I tried to play this game as far as I could, but a bug/glitch decided to halt my progress. It was a clear sign not to touch this garbage of a game ever again.

This is one of the best series out there, but its really hard to play without controller support and I just wish there was a regular camera instead of the cinematic POS it has

It's great for any fan of the classic series, I didn't encounter any bugs and the minimum requirements are compatible even with older computers, but it doesn't seem to be completely compatible with controllers, as some buttons aren't recognized in the configuration options, so you end up using the controller and the keyboard at the same time, which surprisingly isn't as terrible as it seems if you configure the functional buttons in a more practical way. The alternative is to use only the keyboard or keyboard + mouse, but it didn't seem as comfortable to me. I recommend the game if you want to revisit the conclusion of Kain and Raziel.