Legacy of Kain Soul Reaver 1 & 2 Remastered PC review — Oops, they did it again

After a couple hours of playing Legacy of Kain Soul Reaver 1 & 2 Remastered, I was impressed. Not in the quality of the work, but that everything seemed to function correctly, with none of the weird issues or control problems that usually pop up with developer Aspyr’s remasters. Naturally, I started with Soul Reaver. Alas, it wasn’t to be. In most ways, this is a perfectly serviceable, albeit very bare bones remaster of these two games. Unfortunately, issues (or a bug, I’m not sure honestly) with Soul Reaver really soured me on my experience, to the point that I found that game (but not its sequel) to be kind of ruined.

Legacy of Kain Soul Reaver 1 & 2 Remastered contains the first two of the four Crystal Dynamics games to follow up Legacy of Kain Blood Omen. The story here concerns a vampire named Raziel, who is damned to an eternity of suffering by his creator, Kain. Raziel awakens as a wraith and sets out on a quest to get revenge on the evil vampire that forsook him. The writing and voice acting is still pretty terrific and the games are moody and atmospheric. Soul Reaver, however, uses the same audio as the original game and therefore has very muffled voice acting, which sounds odd in this day and age, especially compared to its sequel.

If you’re expecting anything of a similar quality to Aspyr’s work on their remastered Tomb Raider trilogy (which apparently wasn’t actually made by Aspyr, despite being credited to them,) you won’t find it here. That game completely overhauled all the visuals, with not only updated textures and lighting, but lots of new geometry. Legacy of Kain Soul Reaver 1 & 2 Remastered, on the other hand, replaces models and textures. The textures, even in Soul Reaver, aren’t massively different from the originals. While this is a bit disappointing, the game technically looks fine, plus its art direction is completely maintained down to the lighting. The models do look very different too, usually in a good way, at that, plus you can toggle between the graphics as you wish.

On the other hand, Soul Reaver‘s presentation is very pedestrian and somewhat dull. Since this is so close to the original, it hasn’t been improved. Even the draw distance is suspiciously low. For better or worse, the games here are mostly identical to the originals in most ways, so if you didn’t love them then, you won’t love them now. But there is one major change. Soul Reaver has had its day/night cycle restored. It’s supposed to be day for a while before becoming night, allegedly for about seven minutes. Two hours into my playthrough, however, and it didn’t appear to become night. After one of my very few deaths in the game, I exited the spirit realm to find that it was pitch black in all exterior areas.

I assumed it was a bug, only to find out about the day/night cycle afterward. However, it never became day in my playthrough again. Remember, night is supposedly only meant to last about seven minutes, but it was still pitch black outdoors for me three hours later. Obviously I got hit by some sort of bug, but the devs told me that there wasn’t anything wrong. It was so dark outside that I quite literally couldn’t see. I needed to switch to the spirit realm, which is apparently unaffected by the day/night cycle, just to get around. There are times where you absolutely need to see outside in the real world, so I had to take leaps of faith and just hope I was able to make it through.

To say that this ruined Soul Reaver for me is an understatement. I’m not sure why this happened, how common it is, or how to fix it. Hopefully it won’t be widespread, but, for me, it really spoiled my experience. On top of that, Soul Reaver just hasn’t held up very well. The level design is fairly dull, the combat is incredibly simple, and the gameplay too often revolves around box puzzles. There are so many boxes to push in the first game that I started groaning whenever I saw another one. That coupled with the game’s weird, somewhat useless save system made for an experience that I certainly didn’t relish.

You can save at any time in Soul Reaver, but starting the game or dying will always take you back to the start of the entire game, requiring you to use a fast travel station that does a poor job of explaining itself. If you die deep into an area (or need to quit and load your save,) you’ll have to do some serious backtracking to get where you were. Adding a quicksave here or some sort of save to maintain your position would have been an obvious fix but, nope, there’s nothing. Enjoy the 25-year-old save system. It’s not that bad if you’ve got plenty of time, of course, as dying is pretty hard to do, considering that you find yourself in the spirit realm after running out of health in the real world.

All of that being said, the game is still pretty decent overall. As long as you can see anyway. Soul Reaver 2 mostly fares better. It’s got an actual save system plus checkpoints, the combat is far more interesting, the level design has more character and is considerably better to look at, and the silly “get hit once in the real world and lose your spectral sword for a while” aspect is gone after an early upgrade. The second game has more responsive controls too (seems like Aspyr could have tweaked the original game to match how snappy those were, but that’s another missed opportunity.)

Much like its predecessor, Soul Reaver 2‘s character models have all been improved, but the difference is much smaller than in the other game. This extends to the textures, which are often barely different when in remastered form. Soul Reaver 2 with its original graphics is a perfectly good-looking game so this isn’t a huge deal, but I often found myself wondering why Aspyr even added new textures to it. The new ones are higher resolution, but not by that much. In some cases, the original textures actually look better. It’s kind of baffling. Modern textures should be much, much better than the original ones included in a 23-year-old game.

At least there’s no day/night cycle bug to plague the sequel, though, as they didn’t damage that one by adding any pointless cut content. Speaking of cut content, though, one of the coolest things about Legacy of Kain Soul Reaver 1 & 2 Remastered is that it features a sizable bonus contents menu. This features lore, a gallery, scripts for both games, and three areas cut from the original game. You select these from the menu and you can explore them to your heart’s content. Soul Reaver had a whole lot removed from it, so it’s neat for these areas to see the light of day (sadly unlike the exteriors during my playthrough of the first game.)

Lastly, there are no video options in the game. I couldn’t find any way to change my resolution, framerate, or what-have-you. To see absolutely zero video settings in a PC game in 2024 is pretty surprising, to say the least. Thankfully, it runs in borderless windowed mode with a framerate capped to your refresh rate by default, so the games are perfectly playable without settings, but someone’s going to have trouble due to this. Much like with my infinite pitch-black night bug, here’s to hoping Aspyr fixes things up with patches.

This remaster should have been a lot better and I’m sure some aspects of it will get improved, but the visual upgrade here is a big step down from what I was expecting and borderline pointless for the second game. Legacy of Kain Soul Reaver 1 & 2 Remastered will be a no-brainer for fans, since the original games are so hard to run on modern PCs without emulating. If players manage to avoid the bug that got me, they’ll find these two games just as they remember them. With that said, Aspyr should have done better here.

Check out our previous review:

Sorry We’re Closed PC review – Holding itself back |