I have been putting of actually releasing a review for a while now; for many reasons, but I will now do my best to force myself into actually releasing this one; in that way me actually releasing a review I wrote for once, is kind of similar to my experience with the Legacy of Kain franchise, which I’ve tried to get into for a while now.
I’ve had begun playing Soul Reaver, the second instalment in the series, for about an hour in 2022, but had set it off until now, because I had just completed Link’s Awakening and usually need some time between two Zelda(-like) games, to deflate for a bit, and because I knew, I wanted to experience the entire series (or at least the ones I still can cough, cough Huge thanks to @Detectivefail for helping me fix this hyperlink), I wanted to start with the first entry in the series, and that brings me here Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain.

If you have ever heard about this series, but never experienced it by yourself, you have probably been exposed to tons of praise for their story, which is mostly deserved, being one of the earlier examples of an action game that cares about these aspects, while reportedly bringing on great voice talent to deliver it (I wouldn’t know, I played the German version).
But the game unfortunately fumbles when it comes to actually playing it.

One of the first things you will notice about Blood Omen is that it is surprisingly somewhat open world. There are still obstacles in the way, as to limit your progress to closed of areas, but the order in which and whether you even complete certain dungeons is let completely up to you, go ahead and call it a Metroid-Vania if you will.
Your gameplay loop will look something like this:
”Find a vista-marker/Ariel telling you where the next big dungeon is, which you can at that point either fast-travel to directly, or preferably walk to; finding smaller dungeons, Blood Fountains, villages and miscellaneous pick-ups along the way; beating said big dungeon and defeating the ‘boss’ (I will talk about these a bit later); and then maybe backtrack.”
I don’t have a problem with this loop in theory, as it is constantly engaging and doesn’t get repetitive, but this basis will start to show its cracks if you look at it a bit closer.

First of combat, which is probably the aspect of Blood Omen that you will spend the most time with.
At first glance this games combat system might seem surprisingly fleshed out, with you being able to select between multiple armor sets, weapons, spells, items and transformations, which Kain will gradually be unlocking on his adventure through Nosgoth, but you will be discovering fairly quick that just using the Repel Shield and your strongest weapon (regular-/flame- sword) is just the most effective strategy.
If you don’t remember to renew your shield and take damage for some reason don’t worry, because Kain is not only almost as spongy as some of the regular enemies in the late game, but you will most likely have acquired enough Hearts of Darkness (this games instant revives), to never actually be in any amount of danger.
The only way I actually lost health later was by walking through water or waiting for my magic gauge to fill up again after using spells or such; you will do this a lot and it takes multiple minutes for most of the game, as the magic- and health- bar kind of work as opposites of each other.
Not only do you need one to keep yourself alive, while you use the other one to take them, but your health bar will slowly drain with time, while your magic gauge will refill, which could’ve been a really cool concept if it didn’t force you to use spells (which drain magic) and transformations (which also drain magic), for puzzles and straight up locking you progress if you don't refill it so often; which to be fair is somewhat remedied by the regular magic-pick-ups towards the end of the game and this system being easily cheesed as you can just either use one of your hearts of darkness, refilling Kain’s health or switch to the axes and the Flesh Armor, which automatically fills up your health every time you defeat a living enemy.

This games swordplay in general was just not very enjoyable to me. The game sometimes fails to signify if you are currently even damaging an enemy, which gets worse with boss fights and later way too spongy types of enemies. There is one boss fight, in which you first must defeat a guy that destroys the ground beneath you, but just ignores you otherwise, even if you hit him.
Kain will sometimes just not feel like attacking and instead yell out “Vae Victis!” and pose when you press the button to attack; this will also be a common occurrence and happen at the exact moments you don’t want it to happen during your playthrough.

You can skip this next paragraph if you want to, as it solely hinges on me talking about a weird link to another completely different game, I had made while playing, which is probably only interesting to me.
There is a point relatively early into the game where you acquire a lightning spell, which you can either use as a projectile attack or activating switches across gaps, which was the exact point where I drew a weird similarity between Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain and another game I have played through and reviewed almost two years ago now, which is strangely similar in terms of puzzles, combat and the sort , being Lego Knights Kingdom. The connection is made even weirder by the fact that one of that games lead designers Alastair Cornish apparently had some kind of role within Eidos, which published the Legacy of Kain series and being credited in the game Nosgoth, the controversial last entry in the series. Just thought this was interesting enough for me, to keep in the review.

Now the game doesn’t only rely on its swordplay for combat, as already mentioned. There are some more or less useful spells, the Repel Shield probably getting the most use during yours and definitely during my playtime. Unfortunately, most other spells are severely outclassed by the items, whose power should be regulated by them being single use, but they are just so abundant that you will never be in a shortage of them.
You can only chose one spell, item or transformation to be used at a time, if you want to change them, you can either put up to four of each in a quick-menu, which were actually really tedious to access for me, because I for some reason decided to play this on the PS Vita and am now probably the only person to ever do so, as accessing said menus (or the map) requires you to hit the touch buttons on the back, which I didn’t even know existed and are situated exactly where you want to rest your hands.
Putting spells in and out of your quick menu will also be greeted with a loading screen, so I never really used any spells outside of the ones I needed for puzzles or again, the repel shield. It goes without saying that the same issue also applies to the items.

Moving around the world also is awfully clunky and slow. The devs knew this and tried to remedy this problem by introducing the Wolf-Transformation, which is faster, but weaker in combat and even clunkier to control, but it sometimes allows you to leap over small gaps; it sometimes also might just decide to not do this, but it also has the drawback of using up your magic, which is one better used in combat and two means that if you magic gauge is depleted, you won’t be able to use this transformation even if you need to, so you will just have to wait again.
There is also the Mist-Transformation, whose only use cases are walking over conveniently placed patches of water or moving through hard to see cracks in the wall, while using up your magic while being even less useful than the wolf and leaving you open to enemy attacks, while giving you no way to counterattack.
The Bat-Transformation is the only one that doesn’t use up your magic and thus is the best one. It lets you fast-travel across the world to various Bat-Beacons scattered around Nosgoth.
The final transformations name is offensive and will for that reason not be mentioned by name here. I also didn’t ever feel the need to use it. If I had to say something interesting about it, then I would like to mention it being the only one you can upgrade (as far as I know) and is notable for breaking my game when I used it in the upgraded state, luckily not enough to where I couldn’t finish it as this takes place during the last hour of playtime.

Still on the topic of moving around the world, this game visually doesn’t hold up to a point where it made it hard to differentiate between things you can or can not interact with. For example, you will usually not be able to move behind a roof, but there was at least one where you could do it and collect optional items. This isn’t the end of the world but did impair my experience with the game.
~1/3rd of the screen will be used up by really nice looking, but distracting UI.
I did enjoy the janky, early 3D cutscenes though.

I won’t really talk about the contents of the story in this review as the only things you need to know are, it isn’t really that present for most of the game, but when it is, it is a nice break of pace and fairly good, while not reaching the heights it will in later entries. It is the one thing I would recommend you play this game for, outside of historical relevance.

I will be honest. I didn’t really enjoy Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain as you might’ve noticed, but that doesn’t detract from its significance to the development of this medium. Completing it also made me pick up Soul Reaver again, which I have mostly really enjoyed so far.
If anything, I won’t ever forget my time with this first entry in the Legacy of Kain franchise.