The Legacy of Kain Series: Blood Omen 2

Moby ID: 6083
PlayStation 2 Specs
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Following the events of Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen, the vampire Kain has assembled an army of vampires to take over the world of the humans. Fighting across Nosgoth, his goal is to make his way to the great city of Meridian and take control of this stronghold. However, upon reaching the gates of the city, the army is challenged by the Serafan Order, an organized force of vampire hunters and its leader, the magical Serafan lord. Kain engages the Serafan lord in single combat, is struck down and defeated. Kain's sword, the Soul Reaver, is claimed by his enemy. Unconscious for 200 years, Kain awakes under the care of the vampire Umah to a world he barely recognizes. Following the defeat of Kain's army, the vampires have been hunted down by the Serafan and only a few remain. The city of Meridian is ruled under martial law by the Serafan Order, which is very oppressive towards its citizens. Strange glyph magic is used to power machines and fuel industry and at the same time is deadly to vampires and used as wards throughout the city. Kain swears revenge on the one who defeated him and seeks to reclaim his place as the ruler of the vampires.

The Legacy of Kain Series: Blood Omen 2 is a third person action game with adventure elements, more similar in perspective to Soul Reaver than the first Blood Omen game. The player views the environment from behind Kain's shoulder, moving him in different directions, attacking, jumping, using dark gifts, and grabbing on to ledges. Kain's life energy steadily depletes and must be replenished constantly by drinking blood. Blood is found by consuming any living creature nearby, often requiring defeating an enemy through combat first. As Kain consumes blood, his meter is filled up. Once full, Kain gains additional health. Kain also learns new dark gifts throughout the game by defeating boss creatures. Some gifts include: the ability to blend into mist, fire projectiles, use projectile telekinesis or make a great horizontal leap. Many of these abilities can be used to perform stealth kills which will instantly defeat a foe. Kain will fight using his bare hands or by picking up daggers, swords, axes, and other weapons. These weapons all attack differently, eventually breaking, and may also be thrown at enemies from afar.

The Serafan Order uses glyph magic, partially because it is deadly to vampires. Kain will often encounter areas where he is barred from progressing because of glyph barriers and must find a way around them. Additionally, glyphs function similar to electricity in that they power machines and switches. Many of the puzzles featured in Blood Omen 2 involve needing to create a glyph circuit in order to deliver power to a specific point. Glyph energy glows as it travels down its path, allowing the player to see exactly where the energy spark is.

Spellings

  • Наследие Каина. Blood Omen 2 - Russian spelling

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Credits (PlayStation 2 version)

145 People (136 developers, 9 thanks) · View all

Voice actors
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Crystal Dynamics Director
Crystal Dynamics Producer
[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 73% (based on 45 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.8 out of 5 (based on 61 ratings with 6 reviews)

Great atmosphere, hit-and-miss gameplay

The Good
The good:

The background graphics are absolutely stunning: beautiful and detailed cityscapes and countrysides. During some levels I posed Kain at the edge of a rooftop or catwalk, looked down at the city, and wished I could have taken a screenshot and printed it out. The game does a great job of bringing you the habitat of the vampire: back alleys, rooftops, catwalks, sewers, tunnels, and other places that mortals are rightly afraid of. The cutscenes are all rendered using the same engine used for gameplay, no faking here.

The timeline is roughly set in the year 1900 or so, in an alternate world: steampunk! The technology is steam, which is used extensively in the game to add a spooky atmosphere (factories, vents, etc.), and an eerie magic power source that glows and sparkles bright green. Combat takes place with hand-to-hand weapons (swords, clubs, etc.), no guns. The world is very well thought out and extensively detailed.

The choreography of the characters is great and very detailed, especially when blocking enemy attacks during a fight. Unfortunately the actual character graphics themselves are poor. Most people look like blurry stick figures. It is very strange to see such poorly drawn characters against a beautiful background. Kain is well drawn, though, which is important since he is the main object you will be looking at throughout the game. Kain wears several different costumes based on what level you are on. I especially like the way Kain's hair flows back and forth depending on what direction he's moving. Watch from a different angle when climbing a ladder during the early levels!

Unlike the helpless automatons of Blood Omen 1, the enemies here have a rudimentary intelligence. When guards hear a noise, they will run to investigate. Civilians will go about their lives, but when things start happening around them, they will become scared. When they see something horrifying (such as Kain feeding), they will scream and run away. These characters having multiple states really add a good feel to the game, making the world seem much more realistic and believable.

Sound effects are great. The game is full of memorable sound effects, such as the clinking sound when climbing a ladder. This game features very good surround sound! If you have a Dolby Pro Logic hookup, and 4 or more speakers, you will be able to hear everything coming from around you and the sounds will be intense. Unfortunately the music is mediocre. There is basically some fast music that plays during fighting, and some slow music that plays when exploring the level, but nothing really stands out. No rocking Castlevania music here!

As a nice minimalist touch, boss fights have no music at all. This is very useful, because sound effects play an important role in fighting a boss: often, you know what action to take based on the sound effects you hear (a taunt from your opponent, machinery being turned on and off, and so on).

Your food in this game, the helpless civilians, are also used to add background plot to the game. It is great to sneak up and overhear two or more civilians standing together and speaking to each other. They talk about things that would be important in their lives: guard duty, coldness of the night weather, dead bodies showing up mysteriously drained of blood.... The dialog is great and really draws you into the world of the game. Unfortunately, if you show yourself in any way, they will be startled and stop the dialog, and there is no way to get them to restart if this happens. So you get the feeling you are missing out on a good part of the game's storyline.

Like Blood Omen 1, the fighting is very easy (most of the time), and they feel compelled to add puzzles to give the game some variety and challenge. Most of the game is well paced, alternating between fight scenes and puzzle-solving scenes. The puzzles are usually based around switches: you must pull various switches to open doors and activate machinery, to get access to the next area of the game. The puzzles will make you stop and think, but are not hard enough to be frustrating. This is a good thing, since this is a vampire game, not a puzzle game.

The levels are very well designed, full of detail, and 3D settings. You climb ladders, leap from rooftop to rooftop, explore sewers, sneak across catwalks, and so on. The vampire's agility is very well used, to travel up and down the cityscape as well as walk around flat areas.

The game is good about telling you how to play. At situations early on in the game where you use an ability or spell for the first time, onscreen prompts will tell you what buttons to press and what to do. You are left to figure out the combat system on your own, though: unfortunately no help is given during the times when you would need it most!

The Bad
The bad:

The game encourages you to kill everything that moves, even when your blood pool is completely full. Scorched earth. It would have been more fun to have to manage the predator/prey relationship with more thought: if a vampire kills too many people, there won't be enough people around to feed on next time when more blood is needed. Since this game is linear, you never return to the same area twice, so this doesn't apply. A shame, since it would have added a nice challenge to the game, and drawn the player more into the world of vampires.

Strangely, there's no traditional vampire kill: the bite at the neck. Kain uses weapons or claws, never fangs. When drinking blood, Kain slurps it through the air, from a distance of several feet away, in a stream of blood flowing directly from the victim's heart into Kain's mouth. This is bizarre, but probably done to be similar to Blood Omen 1. When victims are posed in weird places, it looks silly: you see blood flowing through their limbs, nearby walls, and so on. The victims do twitch as blood is drawn from them, though, a nice touch.

In Blood Omen 1, there was a unique challenge: in order to feed from a victim, you had to damage them almost to the point of death, but not quite. You had to feed from a still-living body. This provided fun variety to the game: you couldn't just attack everything in a frenzied hack and slash, otherwise things would die, and you wouldn't be able to feed and recover your blood pool. You had to deliberately watch your attacks, bringing victims to the point of death, but not killing them. Unfortunately this is not the case in Blood Omen 2. Now, it is reversed: you can only feed from dead bodies, not the living! You have to kill them completely. Even when the enemy is injured and crawling on the ground, near death, you must still do a finishing move (or wait for them to die). This is a disappointment, as Blood Omen 1 was much more elegant in how it handled feeding. You really notice this with the prisoners!

The speech made during cutscenes, and the conversations between civilians, are an important part of the game's storyline. Unfortunately there are no subtitles. Some of the dialog is hard to catch, especially background conversations (often drowned out by nearby sound effects such as machinery). Subtitles would have been nice.

Unlike Blood Omen 1, the game is linear. No true exploration is allowed. This is good in some ways, because the levels are large and detailed, and it would be easy to get bogged down and lost. It would have been wonderful to freely explore the game's world, though. There are a few places where multiple paths can be taken, but these lead only to places to get powerups or find more victims, and inevitably a dead end. The game uses locks, puzzles, barriers, one-way jumps straight down, and other devices to ensure that you can only advance in one direction and can't deviate from the path they want you to take through the level.

The controls aren't as responsive as they should be. There is no way to sidestep to the left or right, except in a limited way during combat. You have to rotate in place or turn during walking. Jumping is great, though, as you can press the jump button again and float slowly down to the ground. Vampires should move swiftfully and gracefully, and this game only partially gets it right.

The camera in this game is very good. The camera seems to do the right thing, almost always showing what the player is interested in. The game even provides a way to manually override the camera's positioning.

Unfortunately the camera can only be rotated 90 degrees around the character, not 180. It would be nice to have a full range of movement. There are also many details on the game that are small and not visible from a distance. The game is good at putting sparkles on game objects that are important to the plot, but it would be nice to be able to zoom in and magnify what the camera's looking at. Vampires have superior senses, and this feature would have helped simulate this, and provided a good visual counterpart to the game's great surround sound. Unfortunately they did not think of this when designing the game.

The hit detection seems off. Many times, a sword or other attack has just narrowly missed Kain, but the game registers a hit anyway. This is very frustrating during a close combat! It seems that character shapes have no interaction with walls, either. Oftentimes, an enemy will be killed, and their body will fall to the floor with half of the body sticking through a nearby wall! Graphics glitches like this tend to ruin the suspension of disbelief, making the game less fun for the player.

The game is a cakewalk until you reach the only thing that scares a vampire: another vampire! The big fight at the end of level 2 is a rude introduction to the game. In my opinion, this is the hardest fight in the entire game! The game's pacing should have been better here, with more challenge in the middle of the levels, so you can gradually learn to play instead of getting steamrollered by the boss.

The controls seem sluggish when fighting. You must learn the enemy's action and anticipate what they will do, in order to move your character properly. Enemies make minor attacks and major attacks. Minor attacks can be automatically blocked, and in fact it is good to block as many attacks as possible, as blocking will increase your "rage gauge" (magic power meter) which allows Kain to cast combat spells. Major attacks can't be blocked, but the enemies make a point of telegraphing their attacks to the point where it is easy to see them coming and prepare to dodge.

Some say that it is boring to have to drink blood from every enemy killed, and slows down the pacing of the game. I disagree. You are a vampire, after all. It also adds an element of danger: you are very vulnerable to attacks while you are feeding. Be careful of your surroundings when feeding. Are you sure you killed every guard, or is there still one hiding?

The ugly:

There is NO WAY to skip the cutscenes. None. If you die in a hard area and have to replay from your last savepoint, you must sit through the cutscenes again. This gets very old the 10th time you are killed by a frustrating boss! Hitting Start pauses the game. You'd think they could have put in an option to let you skip past the cutscenes if you have seen them already! This would also make it possible to "time attack" the game once you have beaten it and became good at it. It is amazing that they forgot to put in a way to skip the cutscenes.

The Bottom Line
This game has a great atmosphere for those of us who like dark gothic games, and especially vampires. If you are a fan of Castlevania you will love this game!

Pro: Vampire atmosphere, background graphics, surround sound

Con: Not long enough, can't explore freely, some gameplay flaws

Best moment: Standing on a perch overlooking a quiet city street at night, looking down, and soaking up the gothic atmosphere.

Recommended for: Fans of steampunk, fans of vampire games, all you Goths out there....

PlayStation 2 · by Krellan (7) · 2003

You're a blood-sucking vampire, what more could you want? Well, better frame rates.

The Good
Blood Omen 2, like its previous edition, has you in control of the vampire Kain. Two hundred years after his defeat on the walls of Meridian, Kain once again, rises to take his place as the ruler of Nosgoth. The characters in this game, from Kain to the Serafan Lord, were all expertly drawn and rendered. Environments, on the other hand, just didn’t seem to have the right mood set to them. Buildings and walls did not look as textured as they should have for a game of this caliber.

The Bad
After all is said and done, there just doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of good to say about this game. For instance, the fighting involves about 30% timing, 10% skill, and 60% luck. I can’t count the number of times that I got handled like a cheap tool, died, restart and not do anything to vary my tactics, and come out on top. In addition to the repetitive fighting, some of the puzzles in the game just seem overly pointless. There is almost no sense of accomplishment after figuring out a puzzle, in fact, you could almost want a swift, sharp kick to the head, for not figuring it out sooner. Another bad mark for this game, has got to be the frame rate. At times, the game can slow down to a pathetic 10 fps or less, and every once in a while, I noticed the word “loading” appear on screen. Even worse, I even had the game completely freeze on me. While these marks don’t do much good for the overall rating of the game, at least the voiceover sucks. No, I take that back, the voice acting was done quite well. Fans of the series will notice that the actors for as Kain and Vorador have returned for this latest installment, but the mixing seems as though it was rushed along without much quality control. As the game progresses, players will note that the dialogue gets more and more ‘off’ with the scenes on the screen, until it seems as though you are watching a bad Godzilla movie.

The Bottom Line
Overall, I would describe this game as Soul Reaver on pot. It just dosn’t live up to the hype that the Soul Reaver games has set up for it. If you’re curious about the beginnings of Kain, and possibly a peek into the origins of Raziel, then by all means, play this game. If, however, you are just looking for a good game to play, may I suggest that you look elsewhere. There just won’t be much interest for you here.

PlayStation 2 · by Jon_Talbain (20) · 2002

Who cares if it's not the classic Legacy of Kain stuff?

The Good
Honestly, when I started playing Blood Omen 2, I thought "OMG, who the hell made the key map for this game?". It was impossible to play on the keyboard, and I was lazy about reallocating the keys. So I decided to use a joypad... what a difference!

Blood Omen 2 made my day with its combats! It is the only game in the whole series in which blocking attacks is an important thing! There are those who say that the attacks are repetitive. For Christ sake, in Soul Reaver 1 and 2 all you had to do is punch, punch, punch, all the time, to get the enemies killed! At least in Defiance you have other options, like playing "badminton" with your enemies, what makes its combats slightly better than in Blood Omen 2. But in trade, Defiance has that annoying camera that forces you to take giant turns only because the direction of this or that platform changed during your jump!

There's something cool introduced in Blood Omen 2 that became worse in Defiance: Kain's leap. In Blood Omen 2 you can choose the distance and direction of your leap, and that was a feature underexploited in game, although excellent. In Defiance, they had fixed those absolutely arbitrary red circles! I think that it was a challenge to the possible realism of the game. I imagine Kain think to himself "man, if I only had one of those red circles around here, I could be in the other side in no time! I really miss the time when I was self-sufficient, like in Blood Omen 2"!

More about the combats: the dark gifts Fury, Berserk and Immolate gave me part of the most stress-relief moments ever granted by a game (much like the head-shots in Counter Strike). You're there, taking all the pain you can get from your enemy, and suddenly, a la Rocky Balboa, you just finish him with a bunch of really hard blasts! Immolate made it less funny, once the enemy get to suffer less, >:) .

Of course it was a two-edged sword, once you could just keep blocking until your bar was full, and then kill the guy with just one strike. But it depends on the player...

The thing of having many ways of killing is something really fun. You can punch them to death, burn them away once and for all, get silently close to them and kill them in several ways, etc. Defiance is also good in this aspect, no doubt about it.

The Bad
As mentioned before, whoever made key map for this game must be fired! The game is quite unplayable with the keyboard. Everyone knows that console ports usually suck, but hey, what about a little effort of making it easier for us keyboard users, eh? Good thing I had a joypad around...

The story is kind of apocrypha, but it fits in the whole series plot. And don't even start with the "WTF is Vorador doing there?" crap, there are reasonable explanations. It is the same that happens to Phantasy Star III: the story is apocrypha and the graphics are different from the rest of the series, so hardcore fans hate it. In both cases, blame it on the development team (which is not the same from the rest of the series), but I still respect their work.

The puzzles are too weak (actually, none of the series' games is better than Soul Reaver in this aspect), and some Kain's dark gifts are underexploited (like the domination thing: what's the point of dominating one's mind if all you can do is to make him pull levers?). In fact, the puzzles doesn't even qualify for it, once you don't need to think to solve them.

The Bottom Line
In the end, what saves Blood Omen 2 is the fun I had with it. It doesn't matter if the story is torn, if Kain looks like he'd just left a beauty contest, if the game is easier than dying by a head shot. The game is as fun as hell (at least for me), and even if it had not the "Legacy of Kain" trademark, I would like it (some would say that if it wasn't a LoK game, it would be good, but not me).

Windows · by chirinea (47504) · 2007

[ View all 6 player reviews ]

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Girl With a Pearl Earring DJP Mom (11333) Sep 20, 2007

Trivia

Development

Many of the art and characters, and the main storyline has been recycled from an unfinished Dreamcast sequel of Chakan, a Sega Genesis title. The main reason for the similarity is that both the cancelled Chakan game and Blood Omen 2 share their lead artist, Steve Ross. He also co-wrote the Blood Omen 2 story. In addition to the general similarity of themes, Chakan himself differs from the Blood Omen 2-era Kain only in that his body and face are harder-worn and he wears a hat, a worm-riding character is clearly the predecessor to Umah, several enemies bear the "broken ankh" symbol of the Sarafan in Blood Omen 2, enemy designs range from very similar to virtually identical, and the depiction of the streets of the city is essentially a futuristic version of Meridian.

Here's part of the planned storyline:

The City has existed since the beginning of time. Once it was a place of transcendent beauty and purity governed by five beings known as the Aeris. Then, many centuries ago, a catastrophic plague ripped through The City. This scourge cleaved each Aeris into two separate entities: A Siren, a being of light and song, and a Daemon, a dark, vile creature.

The Daemons soon overwhelmed the Sirens beginning a long reign of brutality and horror. They stripped away the Sirens' souls turning them into pitiful empty creatures who wander aimlessly through The City. The Daemons imprisoned the Siren souls in Soul Worlds; strange domains existing beyond space and time.

With no one left to challenge their power the Daemons began to feed on The City's population. They did not feed on the flesh of their victims, but on their souls, their life force. Through centuries of dark rule The City was transformed from a place of peace and serenity into a cruel, hard, twisted place. A place of horror, death and decay.

The striking similarities between these projects and Blood Omen 2 led many Kain fans to believe that Blood Omen 2 was some sort of re-branded Chakan. Some concept artwork was available http://www.andnow.net/chakan/artwork.html

There are also some connections to a cancelled game called Siren. More information on the topic is available on the fansite The Lost Worlds.

Hylden

The Hylden are those yellow creatures that were depicted fighting the blue winged vampires in the ancient murals that Raziel kept finding all the time in Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 2.

Soul Reaver

Despite the depiction of Kain holding the sword known as Soul Reaver on both the game's cover art and it's title screen, in fact Kain is lacking the Soul Reaver, having it taken from him before the game even begins.

Voice Acting

A sample of Kain's famous "Vae Victus!" battlecry (used extensively in Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain) was recorded for the name but not used.

Vorador

There has been quite a lot of discussion about whether the appearance of Vorador in Blood Omen 2 has a real explanation or it's just a pulled-out-of-the-nose item, like to give the voice actor something to do. Near the ending, Kain and Vorador engage in a discussion from which it raises a challenge for a future confrontation between them. In this discussion, Kain already says something about Vorador being 'reborn a second time'. This not only begins to explain that there is an explanation behind Vorador's presence in this game, but also might hint the possibility of more installments of the series.

Information also contributed by bächtÍrmän, Mark Ennis and WildKard

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Jon_Talbain.

GameCube added by Corn Popper. Xbox, Windows added by Kartanym.

Additional contributors: Corn Popper, Shoddyan, Slug Camargo, Klaster_1, Patrick Bregger.

Game added March 31, 2002. Last modified March 3, 2024.