"Devil May Cry" before "Devil May Cry". And I know, that technically DMC came out before (first game came out in 2001, while Defiance came out in 2003), but I never owned a console past SNES, and first DMC game that came to PC was in 2006 (DMC3).
Defiance obviously has a much larger and more interconnected lore. I still have not played any other game in LoK, at least not to completion, but I knowing what happened in previous games is highly recommended, if not outright mandatory. At the least, Defiance does not explain much about relationship between Kain and Raziel, and does not really expand on the characters themselves. Objectively, though, when I played it first, I did not care much about narrative: Raziel just looked cool, and playing as vampire also sounded appealing.
I definitely liked the game as a kid, and I think I did not finish it only because of some crash I was experiencing roughly in the middle of the game. I decided to try finishing some of the games I did not finish at the time, and started from this one. And... I got spoiled by modern games.
The camera here is horrendous. I was not a fan of the camera in DMC3 (or DMC4 for that matter) but I don't think I had just as many issues with it switching just as randomly and constantly obscuring stuff. The angles are bad in a lot of situations, and while you can slightly move the camera and also switch to "free-form" first-person camera, it's still... Just bad. Especially in case of some platforming, where the angle makes it difficult to properly perceive depth of the scene.
But platforming has another issue for me: characters just do not grab onto ledges or sticky walls. Especially with the waterfalls: I had maybe just 1 case of when I was able to grab to frozen waterfall from the first try. Since they are timed, it just adds frustration. I think this may be because of very tight tolerance: if your character is just a singular pixel off - it does not work. Possible, that if I was played not at 4K, but at like 720p, as back in the day - maybe it would be better. Another possible factor is imperfect support for modern gamepads.
You, essentially, need to hack the game in most cases to make gamepads work, and even then there may be caveats depending on which method you use. This imperfect support affected combat for me as well: I practically could not execute special moves. Those require pressing movement and another button at the same time, but for me they just did not trigger most of the time. Maybe it does not like modern sticks? On the other hand, I am not sure I was able to make a lot of combos in the past either, so maybe it's just me. On the other other hand, I never had such issues in any DMC game.
Despite all this, this game still stands quite nicely 22 years after release. I did not even use HD texture packs, that you can get from the internet, it still looked quite nice, and gameplay overall is decent, at least. Give me free camera (for most rooms, at least), maybe adjust timings and tolerances for stuff, and I would not even mind replaying it again, if I have the chance. Or maybe it is worth getting the remasters for Soul Reaver games to also support the studio and increase chances of a sequel.
