That deflecting shield and mass madness are the absolute bonkers as far as spells go.
LoK is one of those rare games where it gives you OP stuff, then decides to keep giving you increasingly OP stuff for you to have fun with.
Replaying it a couple years ago I quickly realized it's best to either go with spells or cards as your back up, as using both negates the others limitations
Soul Reaver feels like a linear, endless box puzzle with shit early 3d graphics
I didn't mind it, and actually enjoyed the late 90s graphics as I'm quite fond of them. What I appreciated in SR1 was a perfect design philosophy blended with the story that allowed for challenge in a game where you cannot die (The only incongruous crucial element was how the fast travel system fit into the world). Something that surprisingly doesn't have as much tedium as you'd expect. It's the first of the modern generation of games we've lived with since, but one wonderfully designed to play to those strengths and negate their problems.
The only big issue I had with the game was the platform jumping before fighting Rahab. I dunno if it was my controller or all controllers in general, but the Steam version was fucking up giving me a delay, that up until then and afterwards was simply annoying, but in that part that required tight jumping made me fall off and redo it a good dozen times or more.
As for the box puzzles, I didn't mind them because I didn't find them too much of a bother, though I can see why others would. Even then I find a connection with them and LoK's obsession with switch puzzles. Without the switch puzzles to give you immdiate objectives to work on all LoK is is wandering through areas to get to other areas given how crude the combat is.
OTOH,
Soul Reaver 2 is a bit better but still not that great
I disagree. Going from the first to the second hit me hard. It was clear in the meanwhile an era had passed and the second game was in a new one. The closest thing I could compare it to would be playing Everquest and then going into World of Warcraft. Suddenly the story and the gameplay were in disconnect (The checkpoints and their ad hoc explaination for them existing) and some of the spirit of the game was off.
In the end though, I found the backtracking and linearity to SR2 far worse than SR1's problems. SR1 had a lot of hidden optional stuff to seek out and explore while SR2 was a line you ran back and forth across slowly getting more and more added to walk along, all with the same respawning enemies along the way. SR1 gave you a projectile mid-game to just shoot enemies out of the way if you didn't want to bother with them, it was harder to avoid SR2s hordes. Going back and forth across that in between plot points I found a hell of a lot more tiresome than a doing a brief box puzzle here and there that took a couple minutes. I could replay SR1. SR2 would be the one I'd hesitate with and prolly would just watch Youtube for the cutscenes.
