Soulcalibur IV Preview

Most of Namco's earlier promotional efforts for SC IV were practically overshadowed thanks to the news of two new-fangled guest characters. The series always treated gamers to a few cool visiting characters, most of which were popular game heroes like Link (from The Legend of Zelda), Spawn and so on. This time though, Namco managed to secure two icons from the vast library of Star Wars characters - yes, it's Yoda and Darth Vader who make their appearance. The catch is though that Darth Vader remains exclusive to the PS3 version, while Xbox 360 owners get Yoda. The developers made it clear that they wanted to add characters gamers would be excited about and that's how they came up with the Yoda/Vader idea. According to them, both characters fit into the Soul Calibur universe (!?).

The controls in Soul Calibur IV denote a fairly standard button layout. During the game, players can pull off a range of kicks, blocks, strikes using button and direction combinations. Every character gets a unique set of abilities and moves, all of which were tweaked in the game to fit various styles of play. Taki, for example, chains her attacks and relies mostly on multiple hits and speed, since her strikes cause less damage than most of the other contestants. The great array of different attacks makes her a serious opponent (did I mention she has gorgeous cleavage, displayed via an admirably realistic bouncing-boob engine?). (Yes, according to our brilliant editor here, they have an actual game engine just for that. - Ed)

Namco is making a huge effort to give Soul Calibur IV a decent makeover. The characters, in particular, were designed with admirable attention to detail and their every move was animated with precision. The stages and fighting areas shown so far look equally impressive and we hope Namco will continue the development in that spirit. What's more, as we said earlier, SC IV brings online play into the series at last. This means that Soul Calibur finally joins a number of 3D Japanese fighting games that already have online support (think Tekken, Dead or Alive, Virtua Fighter, etc.).

For now we know Soul Calibur is on track for a June 2008 release, with a solid amount of development still ahead for Namco. At any rate, we're talking about a beat-'em-up franchise that rarely disappointed in the past. This one promises to be every bit as fun as the previous games in the series, on top of bringing numerous new moves and fighting styles.