Legacy of Kain: Defiance review

When entering a story-based series in the middle, there's always the risk of not knowing what's going on. Yet so mind-melting is Defiance's plot (it's based on time-travel, so say no more), Gamestyle can assure any newcomers that it won't make a blind bit of difference whether you've played every release in the series or none at all. In a first for the series, however, you control both the vampire Kain and the wraith Raziel, alternating characters as the story evermore bafflingly unfolds. Raziel is a creature of the spectral realm, and can enter said realm at any time. In order to return to the material realm (the one in which we live), he must first find a corpse (indicated by hovering purple skull icons) and possess it in order to sustain a physical presence there. The purpose of shifting realms in the first place is two-fold: For one, Raziel's health is constantly diminishing in the material realm (he can only exist in it as a corpse, after all) but remains static in his home realm unless he is hit, so transference is a necessary part of survival. Secondly, and most importantly, the spectral realm is a distorted version of this world, and the change in the landscape's topography may be necessary to solve a puzzle. If a tower is not high enough to let you glide to the other side of the courtyard, for example, simply climb it anyway and slip into the spectral realm, where it grows in height, allowing passage onward.Kain is limited to the physical realm and he also can't glide or swim ("the touch of water is like acid to a vampire," he explains). His chapters, therefore, tend to be based more on combat than on puzzling. Controlling him in a fight is more enjoyable than doing the same with Raziel, as his dodging is far better and his telekinesis more powerful. As with Raziel, you must keep Kain's health topped up - it is constantly depleting thanks to his vampiric bloodlust. It's a slightly pointless gameplay device for Kain, though, as it's easy to keep his health topped up and you'll very rarely need to keep an eye on it.In fact, this whole game is easy and gently-paced. The checkpoint system is forgiving and the enemies tend to stand back and politely wait for you to off their comrades before advancing themselves. The only real sources of annoyance are a few bugs which force you to reset the console; and the camera, which lurches rather than rotates, and sometimes contrives to stop you seeing where you're supposed to be going next. This isn't helped by the fact that a lot of rooms all look much the same. The first-person look-around helps somewhat, but Gamestyle thinks it shouldn't have to rely on it so much.Most of the progression in this game takes the form of unlocking new elemental powers for the Reaver blades, and then returning with these new abilities to a previous area and using them to unlock formerly inaccessible paths. Some of these obstacles are merely doors or switches that will only open with the correct Reaver (Raziel) or piece of the Reaver's balance emblem (Kain), and some are a little more subtle. Raziel's Earth Reaver, for example, is heavy enough to let him walk around on the bottom of bodies of water, and his Water Reaver can freeze waterfalls so that he can climb up them. All the interactive pieces of environment are handily indicated with some form of aura, and unfortunately it's only this and your objective in the status screen that gives you any clue as to what to do next. Even then there's a lot of wandering around. Of course real citadels and castles do look pretty much the same throughout, but unlike games they're not really supposed to be fun.For nearly all of the game Kain and Raziel are 500 years apart in time, and much of the environment is common to both characters - differing only in that it's more ruined and crumbly for Raziel, who is occupying the present day. The only point of this is for the benefit of the plot; it seems otherwise odd to have two characters in different timelines but not have Kain's actions in the past influence those of Raziel. What a missed opportunity this is, as is the fact that there are two playable characters but no co-op or versus modes. Gamestyle is also slightly puzzled by the fact that Raziel's death in the material realm results in a game over rather than, as in previous titles, dumping him back in the spectral realm (it is, after all, not actually him dying; just his host corpse being destroyed). It's never a good thing to find that a game character has for no reason whatsoever lost an ability that was present earlier in the series.Legacy of Kain: Defiance gets a score representing little above average not because it's poorly-executed, but because it's very short and just not challenging enough. This may well be a good thing if you're having to juggle gaming and a time-consuming job - in which case add a point to the score - but for a lot of gamers this title is little more than chewing gum to occupy the fingers between triple-A releases.