With Soul Reaver's cliffhanger ending, a follow-up was outright demanded. Soul Reaver 2 had plenty of hype in 2001. Not only was it going to continue the story of vampire-turned-wraith Raziel, but it was also going to take advantage of the then-recently released Playstation 2 to show Nosgoth in all its glory. While it did succeed on those points, it faltered in others.
-Significant Spoilers Ahead-
Soul Reaver 2 picks up right where the previous game left off. Before Raziel could kill him, Kain escapes through a time portal built by Moebius, leader of an army of vampire hunters. Raziel pursues and finds himself back in Nosgoth before the events of Blood Omen. Tired of being manipulated by Kain and the Elder God, Raziel goes on a search for information on his past before becoming one of Kain's lieutenants. The story is overloaded. Time travel stories are hard to get right at the best of times. This one also deals with predestination and paradoxes which can make the plot very hard to follow. Also, if you are not completely versed in the first two games' plots, you will have no clue what's going on. There's very little background material. Fortunately, the voicework is as masterful as ever.
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The minute-to-minute gameplay is almost the same as the first Soul Reaver. Showing devotion to continuity, Raziel has all the powers he gained from his dead brothers in the previous game like wall-climbing and swimming. He also has the Soul Reaver, but its power is neutered. It can't keep his health up, and using it too much drains Raziel's health faster, making it mostly useless in combat. The Soul Reaver comes in for the elemental-based environmental puzzles which replaced the constant block puzzles in the previous game. While the new and unique puzzles were a great addition, removing the boss fights altogether was a terrible idea. Seriously, there's only one battle in the whole game that can even be construed as a "boss fight", and Raziel is invincible during it. Considering the boss fights were the biggest high points of the previous game, that's a major let-down.
The visuals do show off what the Playstation 2 could do, and they still look great now. The unspoiled Nosgoth is gorgeous, and the characters are very expressive. There are newer PS2 games that don't look that good. The shifts between the Material and Spectral Realms look even cooler with more environmental distortion than before. However, the game is much more linear than the previous games. There's little reason or opportunity to explore despite how great the environments look.
Soul Reaver 2 is not a bad game, but it is a disappointing follow-up to the first two. Unlike the first Soul Reaver which could be easily enjoyed even if a player never touched Blood Omen, Soul Reaver 2 is both inaccessible to those who hadn't memorized the previous game and disappointing to those who enjoyed it. I would recommend loading up Soul Reaver 2 only if you're doing a marathon of the series; it just doesn't stand well on its own. This is the slightly decayed, forgotten middle child of the franchise.
