izigame.me

It's a good game, combat is fun, but it feels way more like a copy of Doom Eternal that removed a lot of the stuff I enjoyed about Shadow Warrior 2.
Pros:
- Beautiful scenery and graphics
- Fast paced combat
- It's fairly challenging playing on Hard
- Weapons are cool and feel good
- Grapple hook is fun and parkour works very well
- Upgrades for both character and guns feel impactful in gameplay
- The finishers are both hilarious and satisfying, and do add a pretty fun component to the gameplay.
- Enemies no longer have RNG weakness/strengths, like toxic/electric etc. That RNG bullcrap was annoying in a shooter.
Cons:
- No coop
- Very short campaign
- Environments are tight closed arenas that are very easy to fall off...you can't explore or move very far in any direction, making it feel very closed off. Shadow Warrior 2 I loved exploring and seeing the environments but here you can't dash more than a few times in any direction without falling off the map.
- Enemies feel less diverse. In practice, the combat is so fast paced most enemies are blurs. I often can't tell one smaller enemy from another. Most of the larger enemies are elaborate spinning goofy enemies, I missed the huge dragon lizard (serpentaurs) and other stuff from SW2.
- It could just be me but the gore feels far less present, in SW2 I recall enemies actually getting visible holes in them from gunfire, burns, and slices where you hit with the sword. In SW3 it seems like they just insta-gib and vanish.
- Much less weaponry. I loved the different weapons you could sort of pick and choose what you liked in SW2. The RNG upgrade system was weird but it was a cool system to upgrade what you liked.
- Sword play is dumbed down heavily. No spin moves, no stab moves, etc.
- I preferred the original voice actor for Lo Wang, but the new guy is fine.
- You don't see rabbits making love!?!?
- Lo Wang doesn't flip off the enemies.
- No central hub or places to explore.
- Reload animations in SW2 were really unique and you could actually get different ones randomly. Here, reloads are basically completely negated by them autoreloading when you use the sword. Which is nice from a gameplay perspective, but I still miss it.
TLDR I'd rate it 6/10, a half way thumb, would much rather they didn't cut all the features of SW2 out. Still, it runs well, is pretty, and fun, just not what I'd like to see in a SW sequel.