I really loved playing this game. I am a big Soul Calibur fan and this game lived up to my expectations. I loved editing my fighter and playing against other people online. The game was pretty sharp visually and fluidly. If you are a fighter fan i would say buy it now, if you just like to looks i would suggest a rental.

I was upset at first because you had to have a different system in order to play as Yoda or Darth Vader but I soon regretted judging a game by it's cover. This game has great action. The only problem for me was that the story mode wasn't long enough. The button mashing was a great addition. I thought this game was great.

Soul Calibur IV is a perfect example of the concept that many other developers are integrating in their games. This is game 3.0. Sony gave a keynote about this some time relating to web 3.0 which was a internet that was more user friendly and shaped by their users with social sites like facebook, myspace, digg or youtube where the users are the ones that shape the site. Soul Calibur 4's most important feature is probably the Create a Character. With it you can create your own original character with many choices, characters from movies or games and even yourself(I created a similar guy that looks like me.)

The graphics and gameplay have taken a step up beautifully. The online mode is another plus which allows people to finally play online against each other. The matchmaking features are pretty lacking but you can still get online and play.

I'm not much of a fighting games junkie, but I do love to play them on the arcade or with friends online,
when SC IV came up at my loval VG shop I immediately though of the greatness that was the third chapter of the story and the chance to play online, instant buy!
Sadly it did not live up to my expectations, the graphics are astounding but the lack of the RTS minigame from the third was a letdown...also even with the lots of new characters there are still so much clones.
Not even mentioning the netcode, at the release it was bugy and lagged as hell, and became a bit better with time, but still it forced users to use just a and handful of characters since they were the most easy to manage with a laggy online componenet...I'm sure that a SC V will fix this and many other things.

I pre-purchased Soul Calibur IV in June, hoping it would be at least as goos as it predecessors. I've played Soul Blade and many of the characters were still going to be in this release, so I took the chance.
On July 29, 2008, I sat by window anxiously waiting for UPS to show up and lo and behold at 11:07 it did, I ran to meet the UPS driver like he was a long lost lover, and I was happy as child on Christmas morning.
I dove right into the game, not realizing I had a key chain that also came with the game, I discovered several hours later.
The game-play had that old familiar feel to it, if you played it in the past you should have no problem picking it up and doing some damage. The characters looks and animation are remarkable as well as the graphics. The different modes offer some depth to the game, but as I have read the story mode was disappointing to most, but not to me. The Tower mode makes up for that 10 fold and is not as easy as the Story mode either. The ability to not only customize the default character, but to actually create a character from scratch is an awesome feature not typically found in fighting games of this genre. You will probably spend more time customizing and creating new characters than fighting. I had my girlfriend come over and play and she spent 40 minutes creating and customizing her character, which took me less than a minute to beat, LMAO. Anyone ca plat this game it is easy to pick up, and once you hae one characters moves down you can just about play all of them. Darth Vader is a cool character, though I wish his kicking skills were a little better, but we still will rule the galaxy with an iron fist.
Needlessly to say, I am very happy with my purchase, the key chain is kind of crappy, but what do you expect, it was free.
Buy it, if you are truly a fan and if you are just getting on the wagon, the learning curve is not steep at all. ENJOY!!!

I think this might just be up there with a must have. Personally I would rate this higher than Halo 3! it's just overated is all

If this already good fighter series does have vader the ths is going to beat tekken easy and the already famous franchise will be better