Soul Reaver 2 is such a fascinating title. When it comes to story, writing, and voice acting, it is some of the best you will ever find in the medium. With that said, while the gameplay I don't think is as overly maligned as it is said out to be, I still wouldn't really call it good either. It's more on the painfully dull side than something I consider "awful". It's predecessor while having gameplay that was semi accomplished by comparison to its sequel, it was at the very least ambitious and had far more moving parts than the game could handle. SR2 has far less going on by comparison. That is pretty much Soul Reaver 2 in a nutshell, story is exapnded upon but gameplay is scaled back.
When it comes to writing and voice acting which is very much SR2's biggest selling points, the game delivers and so much more. Soul Reaver 1 might arguably have a more engaging introduction cutscene for first time players. SR2's opening cutscene for me manages to be so much rich by comparison. There is so much expansive foreshadowing with such simple yet elegantly laid out dialogue like, "you've uncovered your past but you nothing of it", "keep your friends close and your enemies even closer", and "who's better to serve me than whose passions transcends all notion of good and evil". This all in the opening cutscene alone.
As great as Simon Templeman is as Kain. Moebius and Raziel are also great characters and very well acted. The manipulative old man trope is one of my favorites in fiction and Richard Doyle plays that part well. He does a great job at balancing at being cunning, helpless and manipulative all at the same time feeding Raziel just enough of a half truth to steer him the latter on his "intended" path since he has the information while Raziel has the "free will".
Raziel is one of the most interesting fictional protagonists ever in that by all accounts, he should be a character I should geniunely loathe and scream at every time he says anything but Michael Bell manages to make him geniunely sound cool and I dislike using this term but "likeable". He and his voice direction manages to make lines like, "I'm afraid you are simpily out of your depth old man", or "oh please" and my personal favorite, how he smugely and mockingly quotes what Moebius said earlier in the game by saying "death comes for us all". Bell makes all this work.
It also helps that Raziel slowly starts to realize the error of his ways and starts to tone down on the smug arrogance he showed earlier and becomes less narrow minded as a whole.
The cutscenes animations are also some of the best in the industry and as far as the original release is considered still holds up now with how expressive characters can be with eyes, mouth and body movement. The background music also fits the cutscenes very well with my personal favorites being "Sarafan Stronghold" and "The Pillars".
This is where my praise for the game ends. When it comes to everything that doesn't involve playing, SR2 at it's best never escapes the realm of average. It scales back on what SR1 does like an explorable overworld with new abilities and secrets to find, spectral and material realm exploration, boss fights, and even the puzzle side of combat.
So now combat is what SR2's gameplay backs on now, an "actionized sequel" seemingly. Much has been said about how the game never gives incentive for the player to engage in combat. The act of combat is not very satisfying on a stimulus level. It's easy to get hitstunned, strikes never feel like they have weight or impact, the finishing moves Raziel does on his enemies feel like he is tearing through a sheet of paper than a living piece of flesh. Enemies can also break of your combo and there isn't much in the way of abilites other than using the Soul Reaver, a weapon or Raziel's fists. The first one being the be all solution since like SR1 there is enough souls in the spectral realm and a portal to get back where you were and it kills enemies fast and they never pop in more than 3 which is when the Reaver convientently "overheats".
Much of the game is going through the same square meter of Nosgoth 3 times. There is an alternate pathway that leads to a village but nothing too different.
You also keep your base powers from SR1 but you now get elemental reavers to add on to them. You get the latter through the various dungeons and puzzles which are admittedly pretty decently designed and require a decent amount of thinking and thought and use your base SR1 powers too. The problem lies is that they are nothing more than a means to get a key to unlock blocked off door in that square meter of Nosgoth I just described. There are no actual new combat and traversal abilites since the elemental reavers are just keys and nothing more.
Overall, when it comes to story, writing, voice acting, cutscenes and music SR2 is a massive improvement over SR1 but the latter has better gameplay which was never that accomplished to begin with.
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