Using The Force In Soul Calibur IV
It seems almost pointless to write hands-on impressions of a game several of you have already gotten your hands on, by I assure you my hands are professional trained to receive impressions still harboring the faint traces of a spiral notebook I fell asleep on in 1989. Those are lasting impressions right there. Either way, I got a chance to test my Soul Calibur IV mettle against some of the Namco Bandai folk at E3 last week, and boy did I ever fail to kick complete ass. Word to the wise: don’t button mash against employees of the company creating the game. They are wise to such tricks. Could I alter my strategy and beat them at their own game?
No. They were very good. After all, at that point they’d been playing the game for three days straight, so I didn’t stand much of a chance. Still I took a few swings, only to discover the force isn’t quite so strong in this one.
The reps were really keen on showing off the Star Wars characters, so that’s what I mainly played. First came Yoda on the Xbox 360, who proved a bit of a nuisance to my opponent’s Cervantes, who couldn’t seen to land a high attack to save his life. Yes, Yoda effectively cuts the attack arsenal of his enemies by a third, with upper attacks harmlessly passing over his tiny, wispy head. His character model was excellent – in fact the characters have never looked better, but that’s the sort of thing you’d expect from a “next gen” game. I was so busy button mashing gawking at Yoda’s character model that I was soundly defeated.
Then I tried out Vader’s secret apprentice, and proceeded to get pummeled by my opponent’s newly useful upper attacks. He did show me some of the special force moves, including a force lightning attack that actually had me win a round before the Namco Bandai rep realized he was better than that and came back strong.
We moved over to the PlayStation 3 then, where another rep had been working on creating a custom character than looked a lot like Jack from the Tekken series. He moved aside to let me try my luck playing as Darth Vader in a match against an AI opponent.
Tags: dandai, Darth Vader, force, namco, playstation, PlayStation 3, ps3, Soul Calibur, star wars, tekken, xbox, Xbox 360, yoda