Soulcalibur IV

The Soul Calibur series is one of the many fighting game series out there, though this one has it unique differences from the rest. For example the ability to create your own character, or have your character level up and gain new abilities as time goes on. The main story for this game is you are a warrior that must defeat others in an attempt to claim the cursed sword, and stop the world destruction, or something along those lines.

The graphics in the PlayStation 3 version look amazing. There are points where the camera is panning in on the stage you'll be fighting that you can definitely tell not everything is as crisp as it should be. The characters all have there very unique looks. The female especially as some of their clothing choices will leave all wonder exactly how in the world they are able to keep their massive sized chests in them. One amazing example of this is Ivy. The character creation mechanism does allow you to mix and match clothes so that your character can be separated from the original cast of the game.

The controls are both easy and mind boggling. There are move sets, and button presses that you can do, but to be honest I felt that just mashing buttons at random did more good than trying to follow the move set. You're going to be utilizing almost every button on the controller. One point of advice when looking up moves, just remember that the buttons they list A, B, C, and such have a legend on the side that tells you what button exactly they are mapped to.

The sounds of the game are like every fighting game you have a  lot of grunting, some screaming, and the sound of weapons clashing each other. The background music at times can be a good accompaniment to the level, but more times than not I found myself wanting to listen to my mp3 player while playing.

So there are a couple of flavors to gameplay. You have the story mode which basically gives you the ability to unlock characters. Then you have the tower mode where you'll be trying to ascend the tower, meet special criteria (which I could never find out) and gain treasure chests filled with items that you can then use to pimp out your character. You also have your average arcade mode in which you'll be fighting eight matches win all those and win that mode.

In my opinion there is a lot to this game, but the parts never truly come together. The story mode has no depth, I played through it several times, and wasn't pleased how fast the credits appeared. The other thing is that there was leveling up for your character, it is an awesome idea, but it really doesn't work for me. Yes it opens up new special skills that you can customize your character with, but most of the stuff I could do without. The tower mode was probably my favorite mode, even though I could never figure out what I needed to do to get those chests. If you're a huge fan of the series, you're going to or already have picked this up. If you are looking for a solid fighting game, this might just miss the mark for you. Soul Calibur IV gets a 7.8 out of 10.