Reviews: Soul Calibur 4

Buzz up!As someone who’s ­- as the years march on -- become less interested in how utterly hardcore a fighting game can be and more concerned with how a game can move the genre forward, I’m glad to say that Soul Calibur 4 achieves both. Balanced and feature-rich, SC4 improves on the groundwork of core fighting mechanics laid in the series’ previous iterations while giving players a virtual fighting sandbox. Returning characters are tweaked so that they still feel familiar yet fresh, with new moves and chains to which you’ll find yourself saying, "Wow, [character name] is a badass this time around" over and over again. All of the returning vets -- Mitsurugi, Voldo, Raphael, Taki, and so on -- retain their signature play styles, but each receives worthwhile adjustments. You can even tag-team characters now (SC finally catches up to Dead or Alive and Tekken in this respect), a feature that’s long overdue. 

Where SC4 really shines, however, is in its character-creation mode. The more you use your custom characters, the more options you unlock -- with a wealth of weapons and armor pieces offering boosts to strength, impact, speed, and more, while certain stat modifiers improve your chances to escape throws or reverse counters. By selecting attributes designed to compensate for your weaknesses or enhance your play tendencies (or both), you can craft the fighting-game character of your dreams, to a degree that games like Fighter Maker don’t begin to approach. That you can use these characters in any mode --- and have their appearance reflected in things like cutscenes -- is just an extra layer of detail that you must see to appreciate.

Click here to check out all Soul Calibur IV screens.

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