I’ve been playing SoulCalibur IV pretty frequently the last week. It is the first fighting game I’ve playing in years that I find myself enjoying both against the AI and against my friends (who are much better at fighting games than me). The controls are forgiving enough that button mashing can get you though the Story or Arcade mode on Normal. However, with a little time looking through the moves list, and a little practice, you can learn some cool combos and make it through on Hard pretty easily. In addition to the Story and Arcade modes they have a great mode called “Tower of Souls.” Each level gets progressively harder as you work your way through it. I’m really enjoying it because it has forced me to learns some combos and vary my fighting style. Plus, you get a nice amount of gold and items as you play through the Tower of Souls.

The items and gold you win in the various game modes are used in the Character Customization. In the Customization section you can either edit current characters or make your own new one. It really helps in the Tower of Souls because you can take your favorite character and then give them better weapons and armor to make the fights easier on yourself. You can also customize your specials to fit your play style, but really the shave damage and autp impact specials are really the best ones. My customized character currently has 195% attack and 155% Hp. It makes fights go really fast as long as I land some strong attacks.

The achievements have a really nice range of difficulty. Most of them can be picked up pretty easily, but some of them require a lot of time and effort. For example, you get an achievemetn for customizing a character but also for completing the entire 60 levels in the Tower of Souls. Sure, I like easy achievements but it is nice to earn some by actually working at them for a while.

For anyone who even sort of likes fighting games I’d recomeng checking out SoulCalibur IV. It is a great fighting game to play with people who don’t generally like fighting games because there are so many characters to choose from and the controls are really forgiving.