The Legacy of Kain franchise was known for splendidly written and voiced-over epics, so it would be difficult to deny that their stories are the main draw of these games. However, they are typically marred by repetitive and often frustrating gameplay, perhaps with the exception of the Soul Reaver branch of the saga. Unfortunately, Defiance is not another exception too.
Defiance appears to be where the Blood Omen and Soul Reaver branches of Legacy of Kain comes together. It brings an end to the quest of Soul Reaver's protagonist for the truth and salvation from his wretched existence. It also finally elaborates on the reasons for Kain's change of roles from the protagonist of the franchise to an antagonist (and back again).
A player that has played this game to the bittersweet end would contribute support to the statement that the story in Defiance is the most epic to have been written in the saga thus far, such is its potency at revealing the answers to so many unanswered questions that the previous Legacy of Kain games had posed. Of course, it leaves some strings untied, possibly to prepare for a sequel (which may never come as the franchise was not exactly a commercial success). However, the same player would find that the gameplay is not very good and seems more like one troublesome obstacle after another between the juicy bits of the story.
Anyway, the game places the player in the dual roles of Kain and Raziel. At first glance, it would seem that Crystal Dynamics have combined the gameplay for Raziel in the Soul Reaver games with that for Kain in the Blood Omen games. Unfortunately, instead of picking only the best parts of their respective gameplay methods, the developer has included the bad ones and also introduced some more.
Before elaborating more on its gameplay designs, it should be noted here that Defiance has the player switching back and forth between Raziel and Kain several times throughout the game, apparently in an attempt to follow a chronological blueprint of sorts for their travails to give some sense to the story, which uses themes of manipulation of history.
In Soul Reaver 2, the only source of coherence for the chronological pace of the story is Raziel's own moment-to-moment struggle, as the background setting of the game can change wildly as Raziel hops through time to solve puzzles. In Defiance, having to follow two protagonists, each with his own journey, can be confusing. Crystal Dynamics attempts to alleviate this somewhat by having one character isolated in one age of Nosgoth (the setting for the saga) and the other in another age for more than half of the game before having them come together for a bitter reunion.
This latter part of the story would seem bewildering to many players, but it answers so many questions that the previous Legacy of Kain games have not answered that fans of the franchise would not mind the confusion. To players uninitiated with the franchise though, this would hardly be a reward for putting up with the game.
Returning to the matter of the gameplay for the two player characters, they would be familiar to players who had played either the Blood Omen games or the Soul Reaver ones. They play quite differently from each other, though Crystal Dynamics failed to make better use of their differences; this will be elaborated on shortly.
Kain still has his supernatural abilities of turning into mist or a swarm of bats, and uses these abilities in both combat and navigation of his levels. He still has to harm enemies to the point of stunning them into a daze, before biting into them or vacuuming out their blood from afar to refill his own blood reserves.
Raziel still retains his ability to shift back and forth between the spectral realm and material plane; he still uses this for puzzles, though using it for combat is still out of the question (which can be a bit disappointing for those hoping for a change). He still needs to slay enemies and harvest their souls for health replenishment, though he can murder them outright without any loss of soul energy, instead of stunning them into a daze (though in this state, he can suck out their souls too).
These are the only differences between them that can be considered satisfactorily designed. The other differences hurt the gameplay of these two characters more than they enrich it.
Perhaps for reasons of age or merely having more meat on his person, Kain is a bit slower on the move than Raziel. Considering that both characters already have the worries of constantly dwindling health, making Kain a bit slower does not make his gameplay any more different from Raziel's other than making it harder. To compensate, Crystal Dynamics has Kain's combat moves composed more of sweeps than lunges, giving him an advantage against groups of enemies over Raziel. However, this can be seen as a lazy way of balancing these characters.
What is worse is that Crystal Dynamics decided to extend this slight but distinct slowness to Kain's platforming gameplay too. Perhaps Raziel appears faster due to his almost feral demeanor, which is opposed to Kain's calculative tendencies, but such differences should have remained thematic and aesthetic if Crystal Dynamics could not think of a better way to translate such differences into meaningful gameplay contrasts.
Even the more satisfactory of differences in their platforming gameplay may seem a bit contrived. An example is Kain's edge in traversing across terrain in the mortal realm, such as his ability to switch into mist or bat form and back again to cross large chasms or circumvent high walls. However, the occurrences for these are little more than button prompts, which trigger animations and relocate Kain's model from one place to another. They are also conveniently used as checkpoints, further adding to the impression of contrived designs.
A similar complaint can also be made about Raziel's ability to shift between realms. While the story has advanced such that Raziel has fallen from the favor of his omniscient patron and thus lost access to the portals that he used to traverse the veil between the spectral and mortal realms, he conveniently found another way to do so via possessing corpses; there is no explanation for this other than the usual exploitation of his undeathly status. Although it would seem that corpses should be in limited supply, corpses always respawn when Raziel is forced to return to the spectral realm, so this is not much more different in terms of gameplay from the use of dimensional portals in the Soul Reaver games.
The aesthetic changes brought about by Raziel having to possess corpses instead of using portals may seem entertaining at first, but that Raziel has to perform the animations of shaking off the remains of the corpse that he has taken over can become old rather quickly. Having to switch back-and-forth the spectral and mortal realms a lot had been a source of minor criticism in the previous Soul Reaver games, but Crystal Dynamics' decision to stretch out the switching some more can be irksome.
Kain, being a human-turned-Vampire, still has a lot of the vulnerabilities associated with vampires, despite his age. While he is no longer as susceptible to sunlight (and neither is Raziel, it appears), he cannot go into water, but Raziel can, thanks to powers that he gained in the first Soul Reaver. Kain can slow down a fall, but Raziel can do both that and gain further horizontal distance by gliding. All these differences means that levels designed for Kain has far less interesting platforming sequences compared to those for Raziel.
Even so, Raziel's levels are not as nearly interesting as those in Soul Reaver 2. Due to the advancement of the storyline that has both characters generally stuck in a single timeline until late into the game. While there is a good excuse for this step-back in the narrative of the game, this would still be a disappointment for fans of the Soul Reaver games.
All these lead to tepid gameplay in exploring and navigating through the levels in this game. Many of them involve platform-hopping, switch-throwing/shooting, glides and leaps of faith, which have already been done so many times. Moreover, Raziel's realm-shifting ultimately just leads to more of these.
This could have been forgivable if the rewards for putting up with this gameplay had gone beyond just getting from one story sequence to the next, but the optional collectibles that the player can retrieve from nooks and crannies in the levels would seem too mundane, especially for a veteran of third-person adventure/action games. These include the usual health upgrades, capacity improvements for either character's Telekinesis power and unlocks for concept art, but little else of refreshing substance.
In Soul Reaver 2, the state of the increasingly ravenous Soul Reaver was translated in-game into a mechanic by which taking down enemies with the Soul Reaver feeds it, making it more powerful but also a lot hungrier and thus just as deadly to Raziel as it is to enemies. Raziel's Soul Reaver in Defiance no longer has such a double-edged trait, which is a bit disappointing as it becomes not much more different from the physical Soul Reaver wielded by Kain.
Like the Soul Reaver in the first Blood Omen, either weapon hungrily gobbles up the blood or soul (whichever applicable) of an enemy that the player slays with the weapon instead of other means, thus depriving their wielder of sustenance. However, unlike the very powerful Soul Reaver in Blood Omen, neither weapon is tremendously more powerful than the others found in the game by default, so the trade-off may not seem worthwhile, despite the Soul Reavers' secondary powers (more on this shortly).
There are attempts to enrich combat by introducing upgrades for either character's signature weapon as the story progresses, such as a time-bending power for Kain's Soul Reaver that slows down enemies that it strikes and a fiery imbuement for Raziel's that lets him ignite enemies, causing damage over time. However, using these powers require the execution of enemies with the Soul Reavers, as mentioned above. The player is forced to make a choice between having options to weaken enemies but less sources of health and having fewer options but more health, which is a frustration.
Sometimes, the level design allows the player to run past enemies and climb up obstacles that they can't navigate at all. At other times, the game shoe-horns the player into an area by walling off exits with magical barriers, not unlike what was done in Soul Reaver 2. This was not exactly a universally-welcomed design in Soul Reaver 2, so this can be very displeasing to some who had disliked such a contrivance.
That is not to say that the fights are boring; it is just that there are a lot of them. Many enemies in the game are competent in making use of their numbers to overwhelm the player characters, and all have enough martial skill to punish players who blunder. Unfortunately, there is limited reward from vanquishing them; there is an experience system of sorts that unlock more advanced moves for either player character, but this can be maxed out rather early on, leaving no further incentive to defeat enemies. There are other easier ways to restore health than draining away the life and soul of defeated enemies too.
The boss fights are more interesting, but only because they adhere to the still-amusing and time-honored designs of bosses with exploitable patterns.
As mentioned earlier, perhaps the only aspects of this game that a player would find convincingly good are its story-writing and voice-overs, which retain their broodingly bitter themes. A sense of desperation has been included as well, as the two protagonists struggle against their pre-determined fates as their choice of options become narrower and narrower. The dismay that they suffer – especially Raziel's - when they realize that whatever they are doing still ultimately lead to their terrible destinies are especially brought forth with splendid voice-acting and animations.
In fact, Crystal Dynamics appears to recognize the strongest appeals of its game and have included a feature called "Dark Chronicles" for convenient replays of the more pivotal in-game and rendered cutscenes in the game, which is perhaps more useful to those who would rather mooch off players of this game and experience the story without having to experience the rest of the game.
The graphics could have been another aspect that is good. There are plenty of creatures in the game, each which their own models and animations. Most of them are far removed from what can be considered mortal; their appearance, movement and sound designs certainly suggest so. The best animations – bodily and facial – are reserved for Raziel and Kain, fittingly enough as they are the main protagonists and thus will be the characters with longest screen times. The other pivotal characters are just as well-done.
Unfortunately, the environments are not as impressive. Considering the achievements in Soul Reaver 2, in which large vistas that the player can see can also be explored, the much more claustrophobic levels and impressive but ultimately not-interactive skyboxes in Defiance are a disappointment. The level of details in these is also all over the place; in some places, veterans of the saga would have the impression that the textures have been revamped from the Blood Omen games (though to cut the game some slack, a lot of places introduced in the first game are revisited), whereas some others benefit from new artwork and geometry designs, such as locales that had been heavily affected by the corruption that is overwhelming Nosgoth.
The soundtracks of Defiance remain true to the trademark music of Legacy of Kain. There is the main track, which still sounds disturbingly creepy yet epic in an otherworldly way, and which fittingly plays in the title screen and credits. Others are fresher tracks, especially those used for combat. Not all of these are as memorable as the main theme, but they share the same themes as the main track and are usually satisfactory. Unfortunately, due to the gameplay that would become tiresome quickly to all but the most forgiving player, they are difficult to appreciate and may even seem to mock the player.
In conclusion, Defiance has a story that knits together the storylines in the Blood Omen and Soul Reaver branches. However, this is only the appeal that this game has, because the rest of it is so unsatisfying in comparison.