Soul Calibur IV
Genre: Fighting
ESRB Rating: Teen
Developer: Namco
Platforms: Playstation 3, Xbox 360
Price: $59.99; Release Date: July 29, 2008

I’ve found myself less than enthused about some of the games I’ve reviewed in the past, which is not to say I can’t get any excitement out of myself, but when offered the chance to review Soul Calibur IV, well let’s just say I jumped at the opportunity. Needless to say, I am in love with this game. It’s just incredibly fun, jam-packed with features, easy enough for rookies like me to enjoy, but deep enough for the hardest of hard core fighting fans to get into. There’s no point where this game fails, and I just don’t see myself getting sick of it for a long time.

We’ll start with the easiest thing to compliment, the graphics. This is just a jaw-droppingly gorgeous game, and at no point does the game slow down during fighting. The character design is a step above every other game to come out in a while. Just the way the characters move is a thing of beauty, and there’s a layer of polish on the whole game that just impressed the hell out of me. I did see a few instances of some graphical glitches, but they were really only in the cinematic scenes before and after the fight. The impressive thing about the story scenes though, is that they’re all rendered in real time by the games engine, and they still look great. It even inserted the character I created into the story, which I was not really expecting.