Soul Calibur XBLA Review

Soul Blade/Edge was just Tekken with swords but still amazed quite a few people and they hoped that they would get to see a follow up. Shortly after Soul Calibur was announced and appeared in arcades worldwide, and people dreamed of a home version. What nobody expected was to see what appeared on the Dreamcast, the conversion was a work of art and turned out a lot better than anyone had hoped for, and is probably still one of the best Soul Calibur games in the series. So when I found out that I would be able to get my hands on the game today courtesy of the Xbox Live Arcade I was rubbing my hands with joy, heck I actually got up at 6.30am hoping that it may go on the marketplace early, Unfortunately it didn't appear until 9.30am, as soon as it did I was downloading straight away and staring at the download percentage willing it to go faster.



I first ventured into the arcade mode from the main menu and I was shocked by what I saw, each one of the unlockable characters were already unlocked including Inferno and the Edge Master. So I backed out of the character selection screen to the main menu and thought I must have missed something, upon checking what was still included and what had vanished my heart sank. The much loved mission mode had vanished, gone without even telling me. If you have never had the pleasure of the mission mode, it is basically how you unlock some of the characters, weapons and stages for the game as well as a few other things. When i finally regained my composure I was shocked again, no online play. So how the heck am I supposed to pwn some noob American called Docman88 at the game, he can't really pop round for the afternoon to play it can he.



Despite these two major faults though Soul Calibur is still a great game and probably one of the best fighting games on the 360, its just the only time you may play it is when a mate calls round and you fancy a game before Soul Calibur IV is released, or just to kill a quick 30 minutes here and there. Essentially this game is an Arcade version of the Dreamcast game with Time Attack, Survival And Extra Survival (You hit your enemy once to beat them and vice versa) added on to the normal Arcade mode. The controls are pretty good though and work well with the 360 pad, so you wont be moaning about them like everyone did with Street Fighter 2's dodgy controls. The graphics are very shiny and pretty awesome to look at when you consider this is just an XBLA game. One fault I did find though was playing on medium just seemed to easy, it feels like they dumbed down the difficulty level a bit, but thats easily fixed in the options menu.



Also the musuem mode now feels tacked on where before you had to earn the right to see stuff, not just complete the game with all characters. Talking about the characters Sueng Mina now seems to be a bit weaker than before, but that could just be me as I havent played the Dreamcast version in a while, Siegfried and Knightmare fans will be glad though as there is little change to them if any and they still inflict a major amount of damage with very little effort. Like all other fighting games there is a mix of good and crap characters, but enough choice for everyone.



So should you buy Soul Calibur? I would have to say yes, when you consider some of the crap that costs 800 points on the marketplace then this is definetly worth it. What your getting is one of the best fighting games around for £5 or $10 depending on where you live, whats better that Bigmac meal that will last you 10 minute and make you feel hungry again 10 minutes later, or a gem of a game you can play every now and then for the same price. Face it your fat enough and could do with skipping a meal so get this instead.

Since this is not a full retail game my score is worked out for an arcade game.