Blood Omen 2 continues to be simply Whelming. It's not a bad game outright and I am enjoying it, but it has a noticeable regression in quality compared to the Soul Reaver games. It has a handful of features inspired by Soul Reaver but implemented with about half of the finesse.
The most immediate example is the combat. In Soul Reaver 1 and 2, you could hold a button to lock on to an enemy in combat, called autofacing. While autofacing, the jump button and a direction made you dodge left or right, or leap backwards or forwards in relation to your enemy. Dodging enemy attacks felt pretty natural; if they swung their weapon or their arm at you and you dodged left or right, the enemy would miss, leaving them open to counter attack. Blood Omen 2 has autofacing but with only left or right dodging, and it seems like this is intended for specific enemy attacks, as enemies will pivot to hit you when you dodge most of the time.
Block puzzles also make a return, but much like autofacing, its implementation is half-baked. Raziel could grab a block from any side, and then push it, pull it, or drag it to the side, and even flip it. Kain can only push and pull blocks, and sometimes only one or the other, meaning if there's a block you can only push, you have to jump over it and slowly turn around and grab it from the other side if you want to move it back where it was, and I have not yet figured out why some blocks are like this and others aren't.
Like in Soul Reaver, Kain can attack with his claws, but there are also weapons scattered about which are stronger. You can find them rarely but usually you take them from downed enemies.
The writing is a lot more plain as well. The dialogue in the other games was very verbose and flowery, and served as character development most of the time as Raziel or Kain described their surroundings or gave their thoughts, and especially as they traded barbs with one another. The dialogue in Blood Omen is mostly exposition and lacks the charisma of the others. The voice cast is fine, but they seem pretty bored.
The main new puzzle element are magical circuits, and these are actually kind of interesting. In the 200 years since Blood Omen 1, the humans have developed a new kind of magic called glyph magic, which functions similarly to electricity. There are power boxes scattered about the levels, with visible circuits spidering out from these power boxes that fill with green energy when turned on, which you then follow to the end to see what they're powering, usually a lever which opens a door. It gives a sort of gaslamp fantasy vibe to the setting.
A few more interesting additions to Blood Omen 2 are "vampiric lore" and "rage". Vampiric lore is basically just experience points. It's a secondary bar that fills when you drink blood or find lore chests. Filling up the bar extends your HP bar. This appears to be the in-universe explanation for how Kain grows so powerful as to start an empire before the events of Soul Reaver. Rage is basically a mana bar that fills when you block attacks, allowing you to use dark gifts, or spells. There's enough here to keep the game interesting and I'll probably finish it, but yeah, what's here is simply serviceable.
