Blood Omen 2 - The Legacy of Kain Series

Meridian is the reason to look again. Most of the Legacy of Kain saga lives in ruined cathedrals and blasted wastelands, but this one drops its vampire into a working city of gaslight, canals, factory smoke and armed patrols, a place that looks like it has an economy and a police force rather than just a history. Kain stalks its alleys after two hundred years face-down in the dirt, robbed of nearly everything he had, and the setting does more characterising work than most of the dialogue.

Crystal Dynamics built it on the technology from Soul Reaver 2, and it shows in the animation and the moody lighting more than in the level design, which is corridor-tight and gated hard. The signature system is the Dark Gifts: Kain tears powers out of specific enemies he kills, then leans on them to get past obstacles. Mist lets him vanish when he steps into fog and take a guard from behind. Fury boosts raw damage, Charm turns a human into a temporary puppet, Telekinesis hurls bodies. Each one is doled out chapter by chapter, so progression feels less like growing stronger and more like being handed the next key.

Combat is where opinions split. It is a block-and-counter duel system with combos that require timing, and against a single swordsman it has real weight, especially the executions that end a fight with Kain ripping a throat open. Against three at once it falls apart into hammering the attack button and hoping. Feeding on the wounded to refill health ties survival to aggression in a way that suits the character, though the health-gate pacing means you spend a lot of time herding one enemy away from his friends.

The stealth is the part that has aged least gracefully. Guards see in cones and forget quickly, and the fog-mist mechanic is so literal that it amounts to following a marked path. But the game commits to its tone. Kain is arrogant, articulate and openly contemptuous of everyone he meets, and the voice work carries scenes that a lesser cast would have sunk.

As a sequel to the original Blood Omen it is a different animal entirely, closer to a linear brawler than the sprawling top-down quest that came before, and fans of the Soul Reaver line have argued about its place in the timeline ever since. Judged on its own, it is a handsome, mean-spirited five or six hours with one genuinely good idea about how a vampire gains power. Meridian deserved a bigger game around it.