Legacy of Kain™ Soul Reaver 1&2 Remastered Reviews

Soul Reaver 1 is a fine game, there are moments of frustration in which you get the feeling that hopefully the sequel will address them. If you have any hope of that, you are wrong; the sequel is an objectively bad game. The combat is a complete chore and there is absolutely no reason to participate in the combat unless you get locked into a room with it. The enemies in the later portion of the game are complete trash. You will get stun locked and have no choice about it but to die and retry. I do enjoy the story of this series and will finish the 2nd game only to experience that. I was actually hoping that they would have done a true remake of this game but they didn't. It's just a re-texture and re-release with updates to use modern controllers. If you love this series and want to revisit it, I would recommend buying this on sale but do not expect any actual updates to the games besides some updated visuals.

Short answer: 11/10, as faithful as humanly possible, packed to the gills with extra content for people who know about the massive amounts of cut content. The Legacy of Kain series in general is one of the instances of peak fiction ever with topnotch voice acting all throughout and a story that delivers far better on thematic conclusions and character arcs than you realize should have been possible with the context of each game's production. This remaster manages to bring the Soul Reaver games onto modern machines with just about every single tweak I would have chosen as a longtime fan of the games from the original ps1 releases. First things first, if you're any kind of longtime fan of these games, the extras/bonus materials is some of the most jam-packed I've ever seen. You got full concept art for both games, you got all of the bonus content including video clips of the production from soul reaver 2, you even got multiple pieces of fan art and cosplay to celebrate the series. Probably the biggest deal of all, the Lost Levels menu lets you explore cut content from SR1 restored with assets that Crystal Dynamics apparently had preserved in a vault somewhere. There's even a foreword from Ben Lincoln of the Legacy of Kain: The Lost Worlds website. They really made this for the fans. ~ I have to shout out the technical performance of this port. If you look at the system requirements, even the recommended specs cite hardware from 2018 and 2021 at most. The full collection takes up all of 10gb storage, it runs cool as a cucumber, and it can even handle plugging and unplugging your headphones while the program is open. Too many modern releases can't do that! Shredder's Revenge can't even handle that! ~ The aesthetic presentation is just picture perfect. The launcher menu uses the same menu clicks as the original releases always did, and the font they use for the in-game subtitles is bigger/more visible and way more Nosgothic than the ones used in LoK Defiance. They actually fit the setting and the aesthetic, unlike the Defiance ones which kind of feel like DVD movie subtitles in comparison. Oh yes, they added subtitles! You can actually read what they're saying in SR1 and 2 now! Seriously one of the most glaring omissions in the original releases. The original PC port for Soul Reaver 1 was absolutely godawful, with technical issues everywhere from extremely limited remapping options to the music never playing or loading right since it's always one area behind. This collection fixes that and the music now loads and unloads just like the original ps1 version, including the area change bridge. ~ So on to the gameplay proper. They're mostly 1:1 to their original playstations versions, with SR1 bumped up to 60fps. SR1 even still has the stagger when you come to a complete stop from a full run. When I originally got SR2 on PS2, it felt like the fixed version of SR1 controls that made sense and would feel great backported to SR1. Aspyr is apparently of that persuasion since instead of separate control settings for each game there's basically one saved profile of settings for music, controls, and everything that's shared and saved between SR1 and SR2. You get the full SR2 control scheme in SR1, including L2/R2 crouch and aim and right analog stick camera control. Incidentally you can now free aim the camera vertically instead of having to go into first person every time you wanted to look anywhere but straight horizontal. Not that it changes much since the games was designed around the camera being limited to horizontal? but it's still a funney surprise for longtime players. For SR1, the original graphics mode (toggled by pressing R3 on pad or F1 on keyboard) is almost but not quite equivalent to a modern ps1 emulator on hardware rendering. The remastered graphics are a *dramatic* departure from the original look and everything is going to look weird and feel very wrong if you've been playing the original (esp ps1) version for ages, up until about when you encounter the Sanctuary of the Clans. From there the adult Dumahim look fine, the Melchaihim look fantastic, and Melchiah himself looks better to my tastes than his ps1 model does. It might be a crapshoot as the game goes on but the remastered graphics for SR1 gets an overall thumbs up from me. The sound is also hilariously blatantly faithful to the original. If you tab around in the SR1 main and options menus and then quit back out to the launcher, you notice immediately how much more high fidelity the launcher menu sounds are. The sound effect for pushing over pillars in the Force Glyph room are particularly funny because they're the most bitcrushed poor quality garbage in the sound bank possibly. Another little thing is that I appreciate some of the achievement choices for this game. One for killing a vampire with a block flip and another for killing two enemies with one Force Glyph blast are literally things I wondered about and tried out as a kid replaying the ps1 version a bunch of times, so it's gratifying to know that other people were like that too. There's only been a couple misses on the sound design so far, occasionally the sound effects won't play at all (certain block flipping situations in Melchiah's zone) and the warp gate usage is absolutely nerfed. ): ~ SR2 you'd figure would be the shorter review, since it's close enough to modern design that there would seem to be less drastic changes. But somehow I still find myself with a lot of feelings about this one Possibly the most hilarious thing right out of the gate is that the remastered vs original graphics will have you feeling like Pam from the Office just asked you to find the difference between these two pictures (they're the same picture). For most textures they're kind of blatantly the same resolution, and it's 50/50 whether it will gain or lose details or gain or lose blurriness compared to the original textures. The most pivotal change that the remastered graphics do is to Raziel and Moebius. The original was one year off from being a ps2 launch title and you can absolutely tell they were juicing the hell out of the new emotion engine technology. Moebius in particular was modeled and rigged to be the most expressive face videogames had yet done, and his original ps2 model delivers emotions with such sharp expressions and motions of the eyebrow. His remastered model kind of dulls the hell out of all of that, with the lines of his face similarly with a lot of the color design choices in the remastered graphics reducing the high contrast visual design of the original. Both he and Raziel feel fatter in remastered than original visuals, and Raziel's blue is dulled way down. Hilariously Kain himself is another instance of "they're the same picture" between the two graphics modes, at least in the opening area (we'll have to see at the pillars). Overall I'm heavily biased original graphics for SR2, it feels way better most of the time and then it's just a parallel change at most where the remastered fares best vs the original. ~ One of the other little quirks about the remaster is, a lot of the timing of voice lines in cutscenes is tied to the original hardware being slower than modern pc's able to run 144hz and stuff. There's several instances where the lines skip ahead without any pause or gap where they had such in the original. One of the more conspicuous examples is in the opening cut scene to SR2: "On the contrary, Raziel--I knew you very well. We were even close." "Oh please." "Fortunately, you need not love me now in order to be my ally." In between Raziel's "Oh please" and Moebius's "Fortunately" there's a beat in the conversation in the original but literally no gap in the remaster. ~ So far though any issues have been small in number and extremely minor and nitpicky compared to how much the remaster delivers as a positive experience. This is easily one of the best ways to play these games.

When they focused mostly on the first Soul Reaver, the 2nd game got almost no improvements. Some swapped textures here and there which weren't always made by a human.

It is not a perfect remaster, but it is adequate and faithful, and undeniably a visual improvement, though some areas and items received a lot more effort. More to the point, these games have been a nightmare to get running on a modern PC environment for some time. For that reason alone I must recommend this remaster, as it is by far the easiest way to play two of the most well-written and beautifully voice-acted games of the era on a modern system. SR1 and 2 were truly exceptional in those aspects, especially for the time, but even in a modern context - the voice talent and writing prowess on display are perhaps no longer unmatched, but remain comfortably among the best in the medium a quarter-century later. Be warned - autosave is a modern invention which Soul Reaver predates, and while I have only experienced one crash, losing 45 minutes of block puzzle progress to a CTD is a very [i]specific[/i] flavor of nostalgic experience. Save frequently. To be perfectly honest, in a modern environment, especially given this game's lack of consequence for death or defeat, I question why they did not add autosave; it would have been a welcome change that would not negatively impact the spirit of the original in any way.

a very good game honestly, just need to remember its a remaster of something that came out near the dawn of 3d game worlds. the world feels opressive, and expansive at the same time. the characters though basic feel liek they have proper motives, and the combat while it is a bit clunky, feels like what the pre-evolution of what Fromsoft mastered with their Souls games!

A bit buggy in places, but otherwise graphically far improved from when I was a kid. Soul Reaver 2 combat is still pretty hard and for some reason CONSTANT even when you're trying to do puzzles. So you won't get to experience the ambient music. I don't remember enemies spawning so often in the original, but I was also a lot younger, so I may not be remembering properly.

8 out of 10 experience. As good as I remember. My only actual complaint is they didn't refine the controls of SR1 as their jank can trip you up a good many times.

I was really looking forward to being able to replay this game from when I was a kid. However, there is nothing more frustrating then having the game crash, causing you to restart from the bottom of the well without any of your forward progress...this port needs some work, then it will be a good purchase.

"Become My Soul Reaver, My Angel Of Death..." This game is something as a child that I could not figure out to beat, I finally saw that they had this on steam and just new, not only wanted this.... But NEEDED it to play once more, like I was a little kid again. Saying that this game is superbly well done, is an understatement. "You could not live with your regrets, and where did that bring you.... Back to me". I have waited a long time for more of these games to pop up so I am able to replay them again, I am super happy that they are slowly coming to the PC era in this day and age. Now.... The story... ************************************Soul Reaver 1*********************** You are serving under your master for over a millennia now and you are about to take the throne from him due to his time of reign is coming onto an end and he doesn't want you to have it (Kain). So he bares you as a traitor and casts you down into the abyss where you are to spend an eternity in pain and agony. However there are different plans for you, to come back and to take it back from him on which you character rightfully deserves in thriving. The game play is amazingly done and the story is really good. The movement of the character in game is a little bit of a lag time from you choosing the direction to the game actually doing it is a little bit, however not so much its super annoying. But you are able to tell that it is there. Remember to physically save your progress! Or you will be in a world of hurt, even after you have been playing for hours and now have to replay all of the way up to the point that you left off at. Just like back then, there is no auto save feature. *******************************Soul Reaver 2***************************** The game is still well done in aspect of the story line keeping it on track. However, there are some parts that are just drawn out, and tiring in wanting to play this game...Such as, the fact that I have to continuously play until I find a spot to save within the game, instead of doing a quick save. It is a full commitment to keep playing or losing your current progress up to the last point of the save that you found previously. The game is riddled with glitches, going up the stairs having your character turning in a 180 degrees and freezing. Or trying to get over a ledge that is an inch literally not even a step high you have to jump to get to that platform that is not raised high enough to render a jump, thus making it potential to miss and fall and have to get up where you were once again, sometimes during a puzzle. I really loved and enjoyed Soul Reaver 1 but was thoroughly disapointed in Soul Reaver 2. And wishing that I could put two different likes/Dislike button for this bundle as individual games. I would put this one as a thumbs down in aspects of the character movement, the bugs that are in the game, and the save points that were created in this. I understand that these are made during the time of 1999, and that they are polished for today's age with the general same or exact coding that they were made from day one. But the small little inconsistencies is something that is just getting to me personally and don't think I will pick this individual title back up because of them. In my opinion, Soul Reaver One is definitely worth the buy. You can wait for a sale to save a few. However with this game it is not needed, this is well done and remastered to where they didn't change anything from the original.

Two of the best chapters of one of the greatest stories ever told in games. Entirely worth it, and a terrific remaster.