Online play itself is rather seamless and works well. This series certainly has their professional players out there, so be ready to get beaten regularly online. There are also the button mashers out there as well that use characters like Kilik to a fault, but if you’re good enough you can take a button masher out. The Tower of Lost Souls allows you to go through levels of a tower and beat each enemy on a floor in order to move on. At a point you can also make a downward trek toward the sublevels of the tower as well. As you play through the various options things such as new characters and new weapons are unlocked. There are a lot of core fighters in this game, so you should find a lot of good playtime with the going through the Story mode for each character as well as spending time in the Character Creation tool and battling with your creations online.

There have also been a few additions to the general gameplay as well. The big one is that you can no longer block forever and counterattack and the rest of the additions cascade off of that. Your armor will fall off the more you block and your new Soul Gauge could go red and your opponent could unleash the battle ending Critical Finish. This makes the game almost a pro-offensive game whereas in games past you would do a lot of blocking and counterattacking. This could be viewed as good or bad depending how much you relied on blocking in the past.

If there is one thing to fault this game for it is that at the end of the day this iteration is just more of the same. Namco unfortunately hit its zenith in this series with the original that came out at launch for the Dreamcast and recently re-released for Xbox Live Arcade. The company can add and subtract as much as they want, but the same type of fighting mechanic is repeated throughout all the sequels, including this one, without a revolutionary change like the special meters that were introduced in the Street Fighter Alpha series for instance.

Soul Calibur IV is one of the best fighters currently available on the PS3 and is certainly the best weapons fighter. The core fighting system is still there and the additions of online play and the Character Creation mechanic really bring more fun to the game as a whole.

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