Beatiful prerendered 2D graphics, great voice acting, awesome soundtrack and, of course, phenomenal story.
First of all, if you started the LoK series with Soul Reaver installments, yeah, you might not like it. The game was being created side-by-side with SR1 and 2. Back then, both SR and BO subseries were intended to go in two different directions. Thus, Daniel Cabuco was the main artist on SR subseries and Crystal Dynamics invited Steve Ross, who worked on Chakan: The Forever Man and it's unreleased sequel. Contrary to popular belief this game wasn't based of Chakan 2's engine. Just some of concepts Steve brought along with him. Anyway, the resulting game is very, very different in terms of feel to the rest of the series, While SR subseries eventually tied itself to BO, BO2 is a side-story it was always intended to be. Plus, the story has a couple of holes. Is it a bad game then? Hell no! Gameplay-wise, it's better than SR2, believe it or not. Pretty lengthy gameplay, interesting levels, awesome atmosphere (it's different, but damn, it's good) and a bit reVamped combat system to satisfy your bloodlust. Plus, the boss battles that were nowhere to be found in SR2 are now back with a vengeance and so are cool powers you receive after them. The game is different - don't expect it to be anything like SR subseries in terms of art or story - but it's still good, allowing you to feel like a real vampire.
Alright, this game has probably the best story portions of the whole Legacy of Kain series, and that's saying a lot. The brilliant writing ties the events of Soul Reaver back to the events of Blood Omen 1 so beautifully, it deserves a medal. Aside from awesome writing and dialogues, the presentation is top-notch - the cutscenes are great , the art style and character models are great and the soundtrack is awesome. That's the good stuff and that's what makes the game worthy of the purchase. Now on to the bad stuff. The gameplay is linear as hell. There's no sidequests and nothing to explore. The game is fairly short too: it took me around seven hours to beat it. The Soul Reaver upgrades are fairly useless in combat and serve only as keys to the next part of the story (considering the arc words "Reaver is the key", that's kinda ironic). The combat is a mess. All the abilities Raziel got from his brethren in the first game reappear, save for Dumah's Constrict ability. There are no bosses in the game, save for the short rush at the end. Most of the game consists of solving puzzles in the Reaver forges to get upgrades - but those puzzles are awesome. PC version supports widescreen resolutions natively, but only in stretch-o-vision. There's no known fix at the moment. The controls by default are fairly bad, but are fully remappable and the game supports mouse and mouselook, so you can make yourself a nice layout.
I didn't expect much from a free game, but damn... DAMN. I'm not a fan of point-and-click adventure games, but I may become one with this game. This is a masterpiece. The atmosphere, the aesthetic, the dark humor. Download it. Right now. It's worth your time, trust me on that one.
