Another great title in the Soulcalibur saga, but this time on the PS3, with nice visuals and fantastic gameplay.
Let's start with the game modes. You can play multiplayer and online with your friends. It's no special thing, it could have been done better but it's still fun fighting with your mates. Anyway, that's not what you'll be reading about in this review. I want to focus on the Single Player modes, no co-op involved. There are three Single Player modes in Soulcalibur IV. The Story mode (a major disappointment compared to the Story mode in Soulcalibur III) in which you have to fight through only five stages of battles. The Arcade mode, here you have to fight through eight stages of battles (encountering the nearly un-beatable Darth Vader's Secret Apprentice on stage six). And finally, the Tower of Lost Souls mode.
The Tower of Lost Souls is the best Single-player mode in this game. Here you can ascend or descend. Ascend is going up the floors of the tower. This is my favourite mode, you have to fight through about three stages of battles and a boss fight every time you ascend. Every floor has an unlockable item which you can then use in the Character Creation mode. Descend is a survival mode, where you just have to survive through countless stages. You also loose all of your progress in Descend if you die, so you'll have to start again and try to beat yourself by surviving more battles. The longer you survive, the more items you'll end up unlocking.
One of the great "new" things about this Soulcalibur game, is the Character Creation mode. Here you can create your own awesome characters and use them is the other modes or edit the existing characters' costumes. It's not totally new because we already got to use character creation in the last game, but it's a lot different and overall three times better and more detailed. In my opinion, this is a great addition to the game. It lets you go creative and create your own characters like you always wanted. At the start, there isn't much equipment to choose from for your characters, but as you play more and more of the other modes, you will unlock loads of stuff (not to mention the things you can buy from the Playstation Network Store).
Unfortunately, there is no trophies in Soulcalibur IV. Instead, we get honours. They don't count as trophies, but you still can show them off to your mates and as you get more honours - more sweet equipment becomes available in the Character Creation mode! Also, as you probably heard by now, the new exciting thing about Soulcalibur, is that you get Darth Vader and his apprentice as bonus characters. Yes, people who have X-boxes get Yoda, but they don't get Vader. And anyway, you can download Yoda from the PSN Store and same goes for Vader on X-Box LIVE.
There is loads of detail in this game, especially when speaking of visuals. There are beautiful environments to fight in and when you fight, you can destroy various pieces of your opponents armour, depending on which part of their body you hit. So visually this game is great. It can also be quite challenging, making this not a 100% Soulcalibur n00b friendly game. There shouldn't be anything stopping you from getting this game, it's an awesome experience, it will have you playing for hours, unlocking stuff, creating characters, fighting online and gaining honours. This is a truly great game, and if not for the disappointment of the story mode and some minor improvements which could have been done, then this would have gotten an even higher rating from me.