However, when you play an over-powered character such as Yoda, its easy to see that character selection affects the difficulty level I played through the story level on Standard difficulty level without losing a match, and primarily button-mashing. The characters in Soul Calibur IV play a big part in the difficulty of the game, although, arguably, each player's playing style also factors in to the equation. The Hard difficulty level, on the other hand, will provide a bit more of a challenge, requiring that you at least have gained some familiarity with the character you're playing and some different strategies. At least, in the Easy difficulty level, this can be enough to get you through several Story modes and you can do pretty darn good in Arcade. You'll need to button-mash your way into a couple of good moves or so and work on your strategy with those. The upside of button-mashing in Soul Calibur IV is that, quite frankly, it's a perfectly valid strategy that will get you quite a ways. I was very suprised to find that instead of randomly selecting a character from the available roster, I actually played as a character that was completely randomly created when I chose "Random." While this character looked a bit funny, she wasn't half bad. Once I had unlocked several characers, I figured I'd let the computer choose one for me. One thing that I found highly amusing was the "Random" option in the Character Select menu. So, while it might be really cool to try to make your character look like Ronald McDonald or He-Man, the clothing options can be used to make your character better equipped for fighting in specific ways that you desire to enhance them.
Some may chastise it as being tantamount to playing "dress-up", the costume choices actually contribute to attribute levels in the game, which, in turn, directly determine what skills a character can have. The Character Creation mode in Soul Calibur IV is also quite a bit of fun and is where a lot of gamers are likely to spend their time. Single player game styles include: Story, Arcade, Training and "Tower of Lost Souls." Story follows the storyline of your selected character, Arcade gives you arcade-style action, Training lets you practice your moves, while the Tower of Lost Souls provides challenging gameplay to even more experienced players, by offering specific challenges (if you are ascending the tower) or throwing an endless horde against you (if you are descending the tower). There are several ways to play Soul Calibur IV there are four Single Player modes as well as Versus modes (local multiplayer) and Xbox Live (online multiplayer) games. Unfortunately, the moves are labeled with more than just the arcade buttons, and with the number of moves available and the complexity of those moves, I find I've been reduced to primarily button-mashing my way through Soul Calibur IV. The instruction manual provides a mapping from the original arcade buttons to the Xbox 360 controller buttons. Specifically, when the game refers to buttons, it uses the names from the original arcade game. Unfortunately, the control scheme is what we programmers call "legacy" - it is the way it is because it's been that way forever, without good reason or rhyme. Soul Calibur IV comes with a great pedigree and builds on the previous games in the series, hence the good thing. The good thing about Soul Calibur IV, as well as the bad thing about Soul Calibur IV, is that it is based on the previous games in the series. If you're into fighting games, Soul Calibur IV is not a bad fighting game to be into. The sound's not bad, but it does take a backseat to the graphics. Your ears are not totally neglected, however, as Soul Calibur IV has some very orchestral music that helps set the tone for the battles, as well as "flavor text" for each of the included characters. This, combined with the Character Creation mode that lets you create fighters that look pretty much however you want them to, and you end up with some awesome, and at times amusing, visuals. The latest rendition of Soul Calibur, the aptly-named Soul Calibur IV, looks great on the 360, brings these characters to life in vivid color, with break-away armor on several beautiful and destructible environments. That should give you a pretty good idea of what to expect, visually, if you're familiar with the graphical capabilities of the Xbox 360 or the detailed and interestingly designed characters of the Soul Calibur series.įor those of you who aren't familiar with one or the other, Soul Calibur is known for its "colorful" armed warriors with differing strengths and styles, from the intimidating Ivy, with her trademark segmented serpent sword, to the undying Cervantes or the mind - and back - bending fighting style of Voldo, a warrior that can best be described as martial artist/contortionist meets Edward Scissorhands.