The “Break it Down” Blog

Summary [9.0 out of 10]

Soulcalibur IV oozes style, polish and clear design around every corner. Namco Bandai took everything that was right with the last Soulcalibur title on the Dreamcast, made it better and then polished the hell out of the whole package to deliver one of the best fighting games on the market.

Outline

• Graphics
• Sound & Music
• Training & Controls
• Gameplay
• Online Multiplayer
• Character Creation
• Conclusion
• Areas of Improvement
• Screenshot Gallery
• Gameplay Videos

Graphics

If you have been keeping an eye on Soulcalibur IV at all up until this point you already know that it’s a beautiful game.

This applies to both the character models, details and texture work as well as the environment’s. Character’s are fluidly animated and decorated with an impressive level of detail. I would also point out that at least 1 time, everyone that saw the game in action commented on the ample proportions of the female characters as being more or less “awesome” or “freaking sweet”. The few females that say the game in action had a response along the lines of: “Wow… she seems… healthy“. So given that Namco Bandai likely put some serious effort into amping up the T-friendly sexual appeal of the title, they walked that line admirably.

Battle effects such as blocks, attacks and special attacks are all properly over-accented by a nice amount of spark, blur or explosive effects that help refine the fighting and make it feel more powerful.

Another shining example of the polish Namco put into this title are the levels. Some levels are static or offer a knock-off hazard for you to win, but other levels are more dynamic, reacting to the fight either by showing destruction or by changing.

For example, there is a cage level that when throwing characters into the wall, will react by dropping those sides down and growing dynamically as you fight. There are also other levels (like the Star Wars space station or the level with a row of guards) that shrink as you fight, either collapsing the walls in on your very slowly, or pushing you towards a knock-off hazard as you battle. It’s a slow enough/small enough change that it’s not annoying. There are a lot of things in this title, like that, that are polished out so well that they enhance the battles instead of annoy you, which shows signs of Namco doing a lot of play-testing over and over again to make sure they got everything right.

There are also minor effects for each level in the form of ground-destruction that you can see when doing a powerful ground attack or throw. For example on the raft in the screenshot above with Vader, if you throw someone down hard on it, the wood will explode or splinter showing damage where that attack landed. There is no impact to this damage (like falling through or having to work around the hole) it’s just a nice reaction from the environment that you did something awesome.

NOTE: For folks wondering about the graphical differences between the Xbox 360 and the PS3, check out this post. In short, it looks like the extra processing power of the PS3 is starting to show it’s legs, with slightly sharper textures than the 360.

Sound & Music

Generally great. Sound effects, especially attacks and blocks are punchy and sound powerful. The metal-against-metal was sampled perfectly giving a very rigid “ping” when clashing with another player.

The voices are pretty good… a few of the women’s voices (Ivy) I found way too testosterone-laden for my liking, but that’s just a taste issue… the voice work itself was great. There were that many phrases recorded just because of the sheer number of characters, so if you only ever play with 1 character (your favorite character) you’ll hear them say a lot of the same lines over and over again.

I can’t ding the title for this though, because there are just shy of a billion characters, I can’t imagine Namco recording witty/complex lines or sentences for each of those fighters.

The music you will hear a lot of is pretty standard Soulcalibur fare, that is most likely intentional. There isn’t a whole lot of it, in that you’ll notice hearing a lot of the same stuff multiple times, but it never gets in the way.

Training & Controls

For the most part I found the controls intuitive. I tend to play more of a button-mashing style for fighters and noticed that without trying hard I was always pulling off the same moves over and over again much to my dismay. This title isn’t very button-masher friendly, but if you take your time to go through the comprehensive training school you will get quite good at it and start executing combos like a champ.

Besides offering a comprehensive training mode for every single one of the character and all those moves (totalling somewhere near the number of stars in the sky) there is a strong level of polish in the training mode, allowing you to not only see the move list, but get demonstrations of the moves on-the-fly as you play.

NOTE: Whoever at Namco decided to allow you to scroll through demo moves using L1/L2 and not need to go back through the menu, is a genious.

Overall we found this to be one of the most comprehensive training modes in a fighter, leaving nothing to be desired. If you want to get good with Soulcalibur IV, just spend some time in the training mode and you’ll get there quickly.

Gameplay

If you liked the previous Soulcalibur on the Dreamcast and felt that slightly slower paced, but highly detailed fighting style was spot-on, you’re in luck… it’s still spot on and feels even better.

The gameplay style of Soulcalibur is much slower paced than say a Street Fighter and you tend to stay very close to the other person you are fighting. If you are good with combos, this allows a lot of combinations and “juggling” to take place, unfortunately if you aren’t great with combos or find yourself far away from your opponent, you might have a hard time walking your way back in or find yourself juggled to death very quickly by a skilled enough player.

When we first read about the destructive gear in Soulcalibur IV (and block breakers) we thought it sounded a bit gimmicky and were worried it would bring an unnecessary level of complexity to the fighter. After having spent quite a bit of time with the title we are happy to say that it’s an excellent addition that instead of being intrusive, is completely passive and just adds to the depth of the fight.

There is something about having a long-winded battle with a character and then smashing their weapon or armor mid-battle that makes you feel like a badass. It can also lead to your opponent ending up half-naked, which can be awesome depending on who you are fighting… or if they were already half-naked to start with <cough>Ivy</cough>.

From the testing we did it looks like if you plan to enjoy this title, utilizing the Training school is a must. We hopped online for a few Ranked matches and also dialed up Single Player difficulty to Hard to see what would happen and got our asses handed to us.

We have notice that this is true for any title that isn’t button-masher-friendly, but just a heads up for the Button Masher fans out there, you’ll need to spend some time training to actually do OK online. Learn a few combos for starters and you should be off to a good start.

Online Multiplayer

Multiplayer was pretty standard fare, you have the choice of Ranked or Unranked (Player) matches, in addition to that you have the choice between Normal and Special (weapon effects enabled) gameplay modes and then in there you have the choice of Quick Matches, Custom Matches (Searching) or Create Match (Host Your Own).

When joining Player (Unranked) matches you are put into a waiting room with up to 3 other people (total of 4) essentially organized in a “king of the hill” fashion, whoever keeps winning stays ontop, and whoever is loosing gets shuffled, in-order, to keep trying to tackle the top spot.

Each time a match starts with Player 1 and 2, all the rest of the people waiting in the lobby hop into the game with them as viewers and can watch the fight. After coming back out to the lobby, the next person waiting in line is matched up, given the change to select any character they want, and then it’s go-time.

Ranked Matches give you a quick run-down of who you are getting matched up against, in my case Quick Match put me with people that kicked my ass every time except once… but that’s not too surprising I suppose since those Ranked folks practice a lot (Same goes for Gears of War).

Character Creation

The character customization in Soulcalibur IV is ridiculously detailed… yes ridiculous, but in a good way. You can control essentially every aspect of your character, from eyebrow color to the type of necklace to what’s on their shoulders to how they fight to nice boots and maybe a pair of sunglasses… oh yea, and the colors of all that stuff too.

The basis of the character creation is to select a base character to start with and then create a new customization of them (up to 9 for each character IIRC) and save that customization to your fighting roster if you like.

Items that you can add to your character (or buy) can enhance your stats to actually change how powerful, fast, etc. your character is in battle.

Besides taking the time to dial out these characters, you can also take your character online into ranked matches to kick ass. Here’s a video of me playing a guy that used the base Azeroth character style but turned him into a black, disco, hammer-wielding clown fighter:

Conclusion [9.0 out of 10]

We don’t normally fawn over titles like this, but when a developer steps up to the plate and gets everything right, they deserve praise.

At it’s core Soulcalibur IV is an great-feeling fighter. Surrounding that core are some minor bells and whistles like breakable weapons and armor as well as weapon effects that can be employed during a battle. Wrapped around that is a lenghty player roster, accented by unlockable players and outfits until the cows come home. Wrapped around that already complex portion of the game is an unbelievably deep character customization engine that allows you to tweak out and take into battle any character of your choosing… even retarded-looking ones just for fun.

Then lastly, tacked onto the side of all that is additional game-candy like story line road maps, art galleries, ending cinematic browsers, intro cinematic browsers, insanely-deep training facilities and whatever other little polish we missed.

Simply put, Soulcalibur IV is a good example of a game that a focused company can create when they decide up-front that time is no object. No portion of this product feels rushed and every portion of it feels planned and designed.

For fighter fans, Soulcalibur IV is a must-add to any library you already have, for Soulcalibur fans, you already bought this and love it.

Areas of Improvement

This is one of the hardest “Areas of Improvements” we’ve had to write before, there is nothing major here, just minor suggestions:

• Possibly offering a more interactive training mode that takes you through “classes” like we saw in Dragon Ball Z: Burst Limit. The game’s fighting system is so deep that throwing some more novice or impatient characters into the Training Arena with all 900 moves listed off is a bit daunting… maybe a basic hand-held “school” for 10 of the major characters would have been really appreciated here.
• While trying to join matches online, about 33% of the time we would see “Connecting…” then “Game is Full” dialog that would require us to hit “X” to continue… a few notes here, why are you trying to connect us to full games and how about not telling us, just try again. We did select “Quick Play” after all.
• Some more reactive/destructive environments. Maybe some breaking glass, broken boxes or the like. Multi-tiered levels like in the DOA series or the more recent Mortal Combat titles, that allow you to smash a player through a portion of a level down into another part of a level would have been a really awesome addition.
• Un-cheap some cheap moves… you won’t notice this until you play Ranked matches online and get stuck with some level 100+ person that is using Cervantes’s air-attack or equally as cheap/undodgable attack in 2-hits to kill you over and over again. I’m sure there is some way to block that or avoid it, but goddamn… that can get annoying.

Screenshot Gallery

Gameplay Videos

You can watch all the videos recorded for this review (also in High Quality) here.