Soul Reaver 2

Soul Reaver 2 honestly lacks the charm of its predecessor, for me. But that doesn't mean it's not worth playing at all.
We start with an FMV version of the last game's end battle. Kain, celery-plant-resembling villain, jumps through a time portal, and we follow. We wind up in the former Sarafan stronghold with a very creepy man called Moebius. I noticed that the characters' mouths move when they talk and that the audio quality is pretty bad in places, the game could have done with subtitles.

There are a few control differences; the look button is now just R2 and the camera angle doesn't seem quite as pliable with the right stick. The combat also feels a bit stilted.
The natural world of Nosgoth's past looks quite nice. You can't see through the surface of the water and this can make it difficult to swim to the correct point. The souls don't look quite as ethereal as they did in the previous game, and in the spectral realm they are just floating skulls.

Some heads.

There is so much talking and the cutscenes are ridiculously long. Especially when we run into the Elder God again, and Raziel gets very bitchy. He also starts decapitating people a lot. If you use the Soul Reaver to fight, it consumes the souls instead of you, which is a bit of a bother.
The (somewhat ridiculous looking) save plinths and checkpoints have very arty-farty descriptions for what they actually are. But, at least the game actually has save points, and you don't start at the bottom of the Lake of the Dead every time you load.

A save point.

In this game, Raziel collects different elemental powers for the Reaver, which seem to have replaced the search for Glyphs. This seems to be purely an exercise in filling time, not least because you have one of them for all of five minutes before the game abruptly ends.
You activate gained Reaver powers by dipping the blade in an appropriate basin. This sounds simple enough, but you lose the power whenever you go into the spectral realm and another correct basin is not always within a pleasing distance. There are some puzzles requiring you to have one Reaver power, use it, then immediately cross somewhere and use another, all without screwing something up and winding back up in the spectral realm. I had a lot of frustration at this part and it was frankly serious bullshit.
The transition between realms has been quite significantly hindered by the placing of the Soul Reaver and map in the same menu. The latter, by the way, is far too zoomed-out to be of much use.

Glitch of underneath area visible through floor.

There's a lot of enemy bombardment and it starts to get seriously annoying. The humans are all dumb as rocks and can't manage to leave you alone, even while you are fighting the same monsters which are terrorising them. Speaking of the monsters, they are just thoroughly unpleasant. It can be tempting to run ahead through the waves of them but this is not always possible, either due to someone firing projectiles and knocking Raziel as he is climbing, or the electrical barriers.
The spacing of portals also gets ridiculous at times when lots of enemies will be knocking you back into the spectral realm.

Despite the annoyances, this game has a very rich story, which is told in a compelling way. There are some interesting game mechanics, such as having to scoop up blood into a bowl and transport it to another. There are walkways which form in the air out of blood, which are absolutely fascinating but also quite time-consuming to achieve.

At the end of the day, it's a Soul Reaver game, so I wouldn't recommend giving it a miss.