Legacy of Kain: Defiance review (PS2)

The Legacy of Kain series has been going on for quite some time, since the ’96 original which set you as a bloodsucking vampire terrorizing your world in an attempt to take revenge for your own death. In the couple of sequels preceding Defiance, the plot developed considerably, creating a story that crossed time, dimensions and various other undecipherable factors that won’t mean anything to you unless you’ve played the games. Defiance continues the story, giving you the chance to use both (yes, a first for the series) Kain, a full on vampire and Raziel who requires souls rather than blood to survive.

Naturally, things take a nasty turn and the bitter enemies must work together to overcome a new evil (and when murderous vampires consider something is too evil, you know the world is in peril). It seems that every time you reach a new location, the story will continue from the other character’s point of view, which certainly keeps things interesting, but is the gameplay itself worthy of a play through or would it have worked better as a film?

Get the blood flowing

While the game itself focuses mainly on solving simple puzzles to progress through, naturally the fighting aspect is also rather important. A bit of hacking and slashing with the few different attacks you are blessed with at the start weakens enemies to a point where they stop fighting back and can have their necks sucked or souls eaten to regain health, depending on which character you are controlling at the time. As you fight more, you will unlock a set of new and improved fighting moves that add a little spice to the battles, but do little to hide the fact that aside from locations, most fighting is very formulaic and repetitive.

The occasional boss is rarely built up to be anything more than an enemy with a different attack pattern and more health (although sometimes you are blessed with a meter that lets you see how much more pounding they can take). That said, it certainly makes a welcome break from some of the enemies you will have been fighting that level.

No necking here!

A nice feature present in the general gameplay is the ability to use telekinesis throughout your exploits. This can be as simple as using it to push a button out of reach or as entertaining as pulling or pushing enemies off ledges to quickly kill them.

When controlling Raziel an extra element is provided in that you can move between the spirit and physical (read normal) world as you see fit. To move from the physical to the spirit realm, you must merely push up on the d-pad and X, though the other way around requires a conduit (of which there will always be one around if you need it). This adds another element to the puzzles, since you can only walk through gates and bars in the spirit world. Interestingly, parts of the world can change between realms, so standing on a pillar in the physical world and moving to the spirit world could raise the pillar, allowing you to progress further, not to mention the different enemies on each side. This small feature works very well to add a further level of puzzle solving.

Fighting Features

As you connect more with your attacks, a bar next to your health gradually rises until it maxes out and you become more powerful, dealing more damage and causing some impressive graphical effects to emanate from your sword. Unfortunately, this brings about some slowdown when more than a few enemies are on screen, but this detracts little from your ability to play the game.

Aside from the rare slowdown, the graphics look pretty good. The characters and standard enemies look pleasantly detailed and the odd special effect (such as with some impressive looking shadow creatures) raises the bar up a notch, even with some good lip sync during the simplistic but perfectly acceptable cinematics. Even the locations have some great atmosphere and variety; detailed enough to ignore the occasional question of what to do next or why you can’t progress, leaving some happy exploration for the secret tomes that are there for the avid treasure hunter to collect, to unlock some secret features from the title screen.

The crunch of flesh

The standard of sound effects are generally good, especially the satisfyingly gruesome sound effects when ‘taking the plunge’ into a hapless victim’s throat. Clichés of the sound world are present, but fortunately add a certain standard to the proceedings that help suspend your disbelief of the entire concept of the game. Musically you won’t find yourself tapping your toes, or singing along, but equally it never frustrates through overly repetitive tracks. Atmospheric in style and well made, the music reminds me of a good film score, not because of the quality but because like a good film soundtrack, when it works well you become unaware of its presence.

Actually, that wasn’t entirely true… whether or not it was my hardware, the disc itself or just the game’s fault, some loading times did seem inordinately long, especially during some segments that were meant to segue from one location to another with what I can best describe as a warp tunnel. Once I realised that staring directly at it wasn’t necessary to observe anything about the game’s plot, I just hoped that the game hadn’t frozen, losing me any progress since the quite liberally spaced save points. Fortunately, it never did, but it added tension, albeit probably not in an intended manner.

Just how long is a legacy?

With an impressive plot, enjoyable gameplay, decent voice acting and blood/soul sucking vampires, you would think that Legacy of Kain: Defiance would have a recipe for success. Overall it is, but I feel that it still falls short of what it could have been. Perhaps a little more variety with the fighting, less of the annoying ‘trapping the player in a glowing circle until he has killed all enemies’ gameplay elements and more opportunity for clever exterminations like pushing enemies off ledges with telekinesis would have worked better, but it still remains a good game.

With a few extras available from the title screen as you collect more tomes throughout the game, and the pleasure of wreaking havoc, the game will entertain you for a good period of time. Fans of the series will find more of what made the previous games fun, tweaked to keep things fresh, and newcomers will probably get a headache from the plot (though they will certainly pick enough up to have fun). Ultimately it is difficult to isolate many outstanding features or even any very bad elements because the game is generally pretty good, but whether it really warrants a purchase or not depends on whether or not you really care about Kain and Raziel’s final destinies.