MIG-31

As someone who's ­- as the years march on -- become less interested in how utterly hardcore a fighting game can be and more concerned with how a game can move the genre forward, I'm glad to say that Soul Calibur 4 achieves both. Balanced and feature-rich, SC4 improves on the groundwork of core fighting mechanics laid in the series' previous iterations while giving players a virtual fighting sandbox. Returning characters are tweaked so that they still feel familiar yet fresh, with new moves and chains to which you'll find yourself saying, "Wow, [character name] is a badass this time around" over and over again. All of the returning vets -- Mitsurugi, Voldo, Raphael, Taki, and so on -- retain their signature play styles, but each receives worthwhile adjustments. You can even tag-team characters now (SC finally catches up to Dead or Alive and Tekken in this respect), a feature that's long overdue.
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Review: 1up

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