#SOULCALIBUR IV KICKED OUT OF SESSION FULL#

I’m a little disappointed to see that Namco has taken a trip into the seedy Dead or Alive T&A district when it comes to character design – I’ve never seen so many female fighters who look like they’re on their way to a World of Warcraft-themed S&M party – but the amount of care and detail that has gone into the human (or inhuman) form, not to mention arms and armour, is frequently breathtaking. On that, we should be clear.īut once you get past that slight disappointment, Soul Calibur IV is utterly fantastic. This isn’t the Resident Evil 4 or Half-Life 2 of fighting games just a more gorgeous, more polished and more generous package of what we’ve already had before. The eye candy might have moved on in leaps and bounds since Soul Calibur I, but the basic combat hasn’t.

#SOULCALIBUR IV KICKED OUT OF SESSION FULL#

While the fighting seems to take place in full 3D, you still have little control over movement outside of a straight 2D plane.ĭespite the incorporation of the Havok physics engine, the arenas are no more interactive than they were in previous versions and there’s little evidence of any realistic location-by-location damage modelling going on. Can Soul Calibur IV turn things around? Can the series still deliver one more genre-redefining masterpiece?Īfter a few hours with Soul Calibur IV your answer will probably be “maybe not.” It’s not that Soul Calibur IV doesn’t push the boundaries at all – it’s undoubtedly the most beautiful and graphically advanced fighting game ever made – but like the last iterations of Tekken and Virtua Fighter it plays safe. Now a new version is looked forward to with about as much expectation as the average FPS.

Once, Soul Calibur was the beat-em-up that redefined expectations of the genre and actually looked like it might rescue Sega’s doomed Dreamcast. The fighting game that then made jaws drop around the world now feels as familiar and comfortable as a pair of old slippers. Let’s face it, Soul Calibur IV was always going to struggle to make the same impact that the original did when it appeared at E3 in 1999.

Soulcalibur iv kicked out of session