Still with us? We're almost done. At Soul Reaver's climax (or anticlimax, as many would call it), Kain eluded your grasp by escaping into the time stream and traveling into the past. In Soul Reaver 2, you travel back in time, as Raziel, to find Kain and discover the answers to all the unanswered questions from the first game. If matters weren't complicated enough already, you now find yourself interacting with characters and plotlines from the original Blood Omen, itself already awash in mysteries, manipulations, and time paradoxes.
Luckily, you don't need to fully understand the complete back story of the series at the outset of Soul Reaver 2 to enjoy it. Throughout the game, the narrative alludes to past events, strings you along with partial answers to its long-standing questions, or provides you with new mysteries to try to uncover. If its lush CG cinemas and in-game story sequences don't fully set the stage for the current events, its text-based timeline fills in the necessary gaps.
Obviously, the story is a very important element of Soul Reaver 2. In fact, it's your main motivation to progress in the game. With every new environment that you gain access to and with every puzzle that you solve, you're rewarded with a sequence that either moves the story along or gives you a clear understanding of where you need to go next. As complicated as the storyline might sound, it's very compelling and inspires you to push on through much more than the storylines of games such as Eidos' Tomb Raider series.
The gameplay in Soul Reaver 2 is similar to that of Tomb Raider, but it's much more interesting. You move columns and blocks, line up mirrors, jump, and climb, much like you would with Lara Croft. But unlike that series' heroine, Raziel has a number of magical and vampiric abilities, such as gliding through the air with his tattered wings and shifting into the spectral realm, a distorted dimension where spirits dwell. The game sends you to the spectral realm automatically if your body incurs too much damage, or you can choose to go there to surmount obstacles found in the material plane. Often, the two realms differ slightly, and a ledge that's too high to jump to in the material realm will be manageable once you shift to the spectral. You're also able to pass through certain barriers such as gates in the spectral realm, a handy trick that you learned back in the original Soul Reaver.
This time, your goals are centered on gaining new powers for your magical energy blade, the Soul Reaver, instead of yourself. This is accomplished by powering up one of four elemental forges, a multiple-step process in each case that can only be carried out by someone possessing your unique abilities. To light the dark forge, for instance, you must gain access to areas where you can open apertures and move mirrors to allow sunlight to come in, and then affix a special mirror directly in front of the forge. Once that's done, your reaver is imbued with dark energy, which you use to power devices that let you access new areas. Each of the reaver's forge powers lasts until you either light up another one or shift into the spectral realm. Since some areas require you to shift into the spectral realm to pass through a gate, solving certain puzzles requires you to figure out a way to relight your forge power (which can be done in certain spots once you've gained it) where you need to use it.
As you might imagine, there's much more variety in the puzzles in Soul Reaver 2 than in the original, which focused primarily on moving blocks around. Anyone who grew weary of those puzzles will find these to be far more interesting, as they should be, since games such as ICO have recently raised the bar for what we expect from them.
