This is one of the worst games I've ever played!
I'm aware that the Remastered version of this game exists that fixes a lot of the problems I have with this, but I had already owned this by the time the Remaster was announced, and did not want to spend extra 25 euros on the game I already own. That being said, I played this old version and it's so broken it's almost unplayable. But even if the Remaster fixed all the technical issues, it's still not a good game at all, so I would've given it thumbs down too.
Starting with the camera. It has the worst camera I've ever experienced in a video game. It has a fixed camera view which sort of follows you, but not always. Sometimes it does not change its position when it should, sometimes it tries to change the position but gets stuck behind something. Quite often you do cannot see anything since the camera got stuck in front of a wall or a column. Good luck fighting enemies when you cannot see them, or cannot see yourself, or neither yourself nor them. Sometimes you must do complex platforming but you cannot see where to jump. Sometimes you have to perform platforming and the camera changes its position mid-jump which makes it much harder to land in the spot you want to, and half the time you miss your jump because the camera suddenly changed position. It also loves to performs the back and forth crap – you see yourself from your back in one room, you enter another room, and the camera is now showing you from your front, and if you move your walking analogue in the slightest you will go back to the previous room. It is very annoying and it's at times actually difficult to simply walk from one room to the other... From what I saw, this devil-made camera was completely changed into normal behind-the-shoulder view i nthe remaster, so I'm a bit envious whoever played that one instead.
Another related thing is how Raziel's otherworld is so blurry it's hard to see. And it's often somewhat ambiguous what are doors and what are walls in this game. Especially with gates, some you can pass through, but others are just decorative. There are also, tons of invisible walls and you often cannot walk into certain parts of the room or the smaller areas, invisible walls occasionally intrude your jumps as well.
Combat is garbage. I do think it's an improvement since the last game. Kain's magical throw ability is cool, but other than that it's trash. Basically, button smashing with no depth, some of the most basic special moves I've ever seen in a video game. Terrible mechanics such as the charge meter for power attack. And all of the charged power attacks are awful. The game also suffers from the same problem as Soul Reaver 2, it just spams enemies everywhere. Most of the time I just tried running through them, as there is no point in fighting them, but the game sometimes spawns magic barriers and you must fight the horde. Worse, there are so many sections where it blocks all exists and you have to fight 1-3 statues. It happened so many times it's insane. So repetitive and lame. There's no variety at all in these forced fights. The same few types of enemies over and over and over again. Also, enemies have very big health, so the battles go on for a long time, they're really dull. Hit detection is also a mix-bag, some of your attacks go through bigger enemies like nothing, it might be intentional, but it did not look like they were blocking my attacks.
Not far from the end of the game, there is a boss battle. It's one of the worst boss battles I've ever seen. You have to avoid boss attacks for some time and then hit a specific gong. Why specific one? This does not make any sense. And half the time the random gong you need to hit is too far to reach, it's just a very slow, boring, repetitive and stretched out boss battle. It's not even hard. It's just stupid and annoying.
Level design is often terrible, requires poorly engineered platforming, common backtracking. Even though puzzles are easy, quite often it's unclear where you have to go or what are you supposed to do. The worst of all is that once you play with one character, you often have to replay the same level with another character with minimal differences which is not only lazy and repetitive, but boring too. The worst of all is that all the temples have exact same architecture and structure, they only changed the colour palette a bit and made some doors collapsed, and you sometimes have to get through 4 or 5 of these temples in a single level and it all looks and feels the same. Then in the next level you have to go through all those temples again... And I think they reused them later on in the following levels as well. I feel like I played through these exact same 5-7 temples 4 times. So, it's like the same temple copy pasted with minor changes about 20 times...
LAZY!
Now controls. Keyboard has abysmal controls, so I played with controller which has fine controls except that I cannot use manual first person camera look. And I cannot press anything on the menu, so I have to use mouse for that too. The game easily freezes if you look up your inventory. Sometimes you can navigate through it just fine, the other times it becomes difficult to get back to the game, the game just does not allow you to quit inventory, it gets stuck. And you have to mash all buttons or wait for maybe a minute to get it unstuck. Another problem is whenever you grab a new item which you need for progression, half the time the game freezes. When it works I just press "X" with my controller and the message disappears. But sometimes I have to press mouse left click, sometimes "enter", sometimes I spam all buttons and nothing happens until it decide to unfreeze after a minute or two. This part makes the game almost unplayable.
Also, the graphics and sounds are a bit broken too. The fire can be seen in the otherworld, but in the real world, you only see this flickering light. It makes it confusing and looks bad. Your cape gets stuck on air all the time and stretched out for a few metres and then gets unstuck and gets stuck again and it goes on forever. As for sound, sometimes at random them game makes this squeezing short sound which is annoying. Also, when you try to change weapon, often you hear this loud broken crunch sound.
It's also possible to soft-lock the game. There are some areas where if you turn to otherworld, you cannot turn back as there are no turn back points around and you cannot escape since you had to perform an action in the physical world. Luckily, you can load saves back, but still...
The only enjoyable moments come rare in this game. I liked those two "light 6 orbs for the angel statue" puzzles, as you had search the room thoroughly. Those two rooms were pretty creative and fun, probably the highlight of the game. The story is good, but when the majority of gameplay is miserable it does not make the game worth playing.
Overall, it's insane to me that this game was well received. It's overwhelmingly worse than the previous 3 Legacy of Kain games in the very least. Irredeemable trash.
2/10
