Soul Calibur IV is a fighting game based on weapon combat. I can say right now that it is my favorite fighting game to date. It has tons of modes, many characters, great replay value, and a decent multi-player.

The first thing I would like to say about this game is that it has a plethora of modes. There are five different modes with many game types to choose! The first mode is single player. In the single player mode you can find four game types. The first of these is story mode, were you select a character and take him through his own story line. Story mode starts off with you reading a bunch of text to find out what and why your character is embarking on this mission. The story mode is very short. On normal difficulty you can beat it in ten minutes or quicker if you are good at the game. The short campaign tries to make up for its self because you can play through with all 33 characters but the primary objective of the campaigns are nearly identical, and the stages are mostly the same every play through. The second mode you can play is arcade, which is the classic way to play the game. There are 8 stages, each stage is best of 3, and you play for high scores and fastest time.

The next single player mode is Tower of Lost Souls. The premise of the Tower of Lost Souls is that you have two options. Ascend or descend the tower. If you choose to ascend the tower you get to choose a challenge, which is a set of floors, which you have to beat. Most of the times you get to take on the challenge with two to three characters. Each floor within the challenge is its own fight. On each floor you can fight against two to four opponents. Your characters do not regain health after each floor so you need some skill to get really far. But if ascending towers isn’t your thing you can always descend. Descending the tower takes you into a survival mode of sorts. You select two characters and it starts you on floor one, beat it and go onto floor two. The challenging part about this is that your characters don’t regain their health. Now I have only been able to get to floor 5 and I can’t get past it, so your characters might eventually be able to regain health if the game likes you.

One of the biggest draws to the game is the character customization. Yu can customize an existing character or create a new one from scratch. When you chose to edit an existing character you get to choose new armor, weapons, and special abilities for him/her. What armor you pick reflects on your characters HP, Attack, and Defense. Creating a character from scratch is basically the same except you have more options. First you pick your characters gender and fighting style. The fighting style is based off some of the characters in the game. Then you can edit there armor, attributes, skills, weapons, what their voice sounds like, and what they look like. The character creation tool has lots of depth.

Another huge part of this game is the multi-player. For the first time in this series you can play people from around the world on Xbox Live. And as much as everyone loves online multi-player, this one isn’t the best, but it’s still good. You can select 2 different modes to play in multi-player, standard or special. Standard mode is select a character and fight. Special mode is the same except you can use you custom characters and their advantages in HP, Attack, and Defense. Now when you go to find a match you can become very frustrated. Mainly because when you go to do a quick match it isn’t that quick. 9/10 it won’t connect to anybody’s game. It will say searching, then matching, and then Game session full! Wait what? Game session full? Why is it trying to match me with full game session, that doesn’t make sense! You would think it would try and match you with someone who is doing a quick search also, but no it does. Anyway that’s just the ranked. In Player matches you can do 2 v 2, and that’s really the only difference. You also get a level bar. Your level bar goes up as you earn XP. There is a catch though. When you have enough XP to level up you won’t level up. Instead you have to win another match to level up. Local multi-player is present too. It’s just like the previous modes I have mentioned except locally.

This game has a variety of different characters, 33 characters to be exact. Some of the characters are locked. Most of them you have to buy (with fake in game money) to unlock and the others you unlock by playing through the story mode. Each character has his or her own fighting style and weapon. Some of my favorite characters are Mitsurugi, Kilk, Nightmare, Siegfried, Yoda, and The Apprentice. What was that you say? The last two characters I mentioned were Star Wars characters. That’s right; in the Xbox version of Soul Calibur you get two characters from the Star Wars universe. You get everyone’s favorite Yoda and the new comer to the series The Apprentice. Let’s talk about Yoda first. Yoda has some features that make him great to use. The first is his size; he is so small you can’t grab him. This is great while playing as him, but the most annoying thing playing against him. The second great thing about Yoda is that he jumps around a lot, this makes him really hard to hit. The Apprentice key feature is the force. He uses it as if there is unlimited force in the universe. There is a small draw back to The Apprentice’s force abilities, they run out! Under the health bar there is a little blue bar that shows how much force The Apprentice has left, if he runs out of force than is stunned for a few seconds. Yoda has the same blue bar but I haven’t seen him use the force so much that he runs out. Now I know some 360 owners might be pissed because they don’t get Darth Vader, and PS3 owners are pissed they don’t have Yoda. I have a feeling that each console will get the character they don’t have. The Star Wars characters are at the top of the character grid. The strange thing is the first row goes, Yoda, a blank space, The Apprentice, and then bonus characters. I have a feeling Vader might fill that space (or Yoda for the ps3). Or I could be entirely wrong and each console will get one new exclusive character. This game has an awesome line up of characters that should please many.

Last, and defiantly least, is the Museum mode. Basically you go in and look at drawings of the characters of the game, but you have to unlock them first. You unlock them by spending the gold you earn from beating the various modes and wasting it on some lame pictures. Another thing you can find in there is the theater. Wait you mean like in Halo 3 were I can capture and replay game footage? NO. It’s just there so you can watch the endings to the story mode or the opening cinematic, but that’s about it. This mode is pretty lame and probably made with diehard fans in mind.

The bottom line for this game is that it is FUN. You sit down to play it and you can enjoy yourself. This game also has one of the most EPIC moments when you pit Yoda versus The Apprentice. It is just a satisfying experience that has a lot of depth and replay value and this is defiantly the best fighting game of the year.

Leave a Reply