by Susie Vee

PLATFORM: PC/PS2

PUBLISHER: Eidos

DEVELOPER: Crystal Dynamics

GENRE: Action

ESRB: Mature

TV producers are always looking for a potential spin-off from a hit show. The Jeffersons was a spin-off of All in the Family, Xena was a spin-off of Hercules and Laverne & Shirley was a spin-off of Happy Days.

What does this have to do with Raziel the vampire and his multi-game quest for revenge? The original Soul Reaver game was a spin-off of an earlier game, Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain. This 1996 PlayStation title was a modest hit, and instead of a straight sequel, the next incarnation used the background to take the story in a new direction.

In Blood Omen, you conroll Kain the anti-hero. As a murder victim revived as a vampire, you seekbloody revenge against a number of different adversaries. The spin-off, Soul Reaver, transports you into the future, when Kain is the despotic ruler of the vampires. As one of his lieutenants, Raziel, you get on Kain's bad side and he throws you into a fiery pit of eternal torment (it's a long story).

Raziel excapes his undead hell, with the help of a giant, tentacled elder god, but he's a mere shell of his former self. As a half-ghost, half-vampire, you survive by sucking souls instead of blood, and your quest is to seek revenge on Kain.

Without knowledge of the first game, Soul Reaver 2 won't make much sense. The new saga starts where Soul Reaver ended. And though there's a brief history included in the game manual and on the disk, there's still a good chance that, if you didn't finish the original, you'll have no idea what's going on.

Soul Reaver 2 also begins with an eternity of dialogue. Unfortunately, you can't skip these cut scenes, and if you have to repeat them, they can get tedious.

As soon as the game does start, you're thrust into action. Most often, you'll spar with human soldiers or monsters. The controls make this somewhat of a challenge. We won't even go into how useless the default control settings are. You have to change almost every key binding to get anything resembling a useful set of controls.

By now most first- and third-person action titles have settled on a standard control setup--mouse to look, "w-a-s-d" keys to move. But Soul Reaver's controls are a mess, with a total lack of strafing or walking backwards.

You can lock on to targets and circle around them, but you'll often get turned around and have to use the "auto-face" button frequently. Combat is largely of the hack-and-slash variety, with you hoping to get enough hits in before your energy runs out.

Soul Reaver's clever catch--just like the first game--is that you can shift into the spirit plane, where the world is laid out slightly differently. Sometimes you have to shift to get past an obstacle. You also shift when you run out of energy, as opposed to dying (after all, you're already dead).

It's a shame the gameplay is so shallow, because Soul Reaver 2 looks great. With gothic architecture and wide-open expanses, you'll often just swing the camera around to get a good look at things. The sound and music are also very polished. The voiceovers are slightly over-emotional but lack the amateur-hour quality of so many other games.

One final bonus--the in-game engine animates mouth movements exceptionally well. Lips and teeth move independently, and every game developer should move to this system, instead of the lame "open-mouth, closed-mouth" face skins we still see far too often.

Female characters are few and far between, although the female human soldiers you encounter are quite tough. If you enjoyed Soul Reaver, then the sequel is more of the same. In the end, however, we suspect the casual gamer will grow tired with the sequel's repetitive pacing, making this a game few will play to the end.

SCORE: 6.0