Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain

I do appreciate that this game is available at long last on pc, no longer constrained to a dead console, but it's still hard to believe that The Legacy of Kain started out with a slow, clunky game that looks like it was made for the Sega CD, not at all a next-gen console like the PSX was. The story is dark and metal as all hell, but this is NOT a good game. Dated, even by Playstation's standards. The same voice actors for over half the cast. Stiff attacks with little to no tactics involved. What really bothered me was how you had to advance the story by stepping on specific tiles that played voice clips. In all honestly, Silicon Knights kinda stunk at making this, which is why Crystal Dynamics had to be brought in in the first place, further compicating ownership of this title. Now, if this game were remade with the Blood Omen 2 engine, or at least the Soul Reaver engine, then THAT would be a sight to see. Imagine seeing Nosgoth in 3D glory, before being doomed to slowly decay through the machinations of beings most foul. Sadly, with the aforementioned complicated ownership, I seriously doubt a remake is possible, at least not an official one. I suppose we'll have to hope for an unofficial remake that won't feel like a slow, painful slog.

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The main thing to mention is that the game as-is has an audio bug that can crash your PC, requiring a reboot. Checking the forums led me to a downloadable DLL file that fixed the issue and also corrected a few other smaller issues, such as level title screens flashing by too quickly. So it's unplayable as-is but a simple mod fixes it. Once that's fixed, the game is quite good. For its era, at least. The puzzles evolve as the game goes on, so they're trivial in the beginning but require a bit of thinking in later levels. Nothing too challenging; just enough that you don't completely steamroll through everything. Exploration is rewarded with EXP points which expand your life gauge, but the maps are never sprawling enough to feel like any exploration is going very far out of your way, and if you didn't feel like exploring, it's easy enough to get EXP through combat. You're not gonna get lost in this game. The combat is a mixed bag. Limited-durability weapons keep you weighing your options whenever you find a new one, but later enemies are so inclined to block everything you do that sometimes a sword will only last long enough to kill a single enemy. Getting around enemy defenses can be frustratingly time-consuming, although you get an ability later in the game that mitigates this. When there are multiple enemies you really have to plan your approach. A key element of the game is that your health is always going down, as Kain needs to constantly feed on enemies to keep his health up. This was never an issue during my playthrough as it's easy to keep feeding, but it's cool that the game forces you to not dawdle. The gameplay is only just challenging enough to not be a cakewalk, but the main reason to play this game is the story. The voice acting is first-rate, and there are enough plot developments to keep your interest piqued. Overall it's a fun game and if you liked the Soul Reaver games you'll probably like this.

I had this back when the PS1 was new for that platform. I never ended up completing it and I didn't remember a whole lot from it coming back now to play through it. This is an excellent game. The voice acting is surprising well done for a game of that year. Install the Vektor patch to clean up the graphics a bit. After installing that though my controller stopped working when launching which was remedied by launching from Steam. Some of the controls can be clunky at times but you adapt. You end up learning the weapons to use against which enemies as well to be more effective. The game isn't overly difficult either but isn't exactly easy. I would say the difficulty level is enough to make the game enjoyable but challenging. Some of the boss fights can be obnoxious but again, you adapt and power through. This game kept my attention and really pushed me to keep going. I recommend this to anybody that likes that top down action adventure style game. This is one of the better ones out there and after playing it I would almost put it in the classic category. It really holds up after all these years which is the sign of a true classic.

*Deletes PlayStation ISO*