izigame.me

YOU WILL STOP PROCRASTINATING. LATER.

Among the many shooters I have played, play, and still intend to play, this solid reboot of Shadow Warrior has the dubious quality of being one of the best for a laid-back gaming experience.
It's the right game for certain moments: When you don't want to think or try too hard to engage in cathartic, violent, and mindless fun.
Like Serious Sam, Painkiller, and many old shooters from the 90s (like SW itself), it perfectly balances the lack of creativity and mechanical demand needed to play a more robust shooter and the primitive satisfaction of seeing things explode into pieces and bloody clouds. It's the right measure between mediocrity, stupidity, and spectacle.
Shadow Warrior is an unpretentious, safe, and straight-to-the-point reboot that carries a healthy dose of modernized nostalgia in its design, spiced with cheap, sarcastic, and juvenile humor easily found in social media. In other words: It's like playing a modernized mental version of a 90s shooter. It's the same kind of ideas but updated for today.
Ironically, despite Doom 2016 revitalizing the genre and triggering an epidemic of modern classics, SW reflects much better what those old games were. Doom was something new and innovative that revived and translated a few old deisng precepts, while Shadow Warrior is an old game with a new coat.
The game consists of navigating through a myriad of varied and reasonably sized levels, exploring for ammunition, money, and secrets to feed the grind of a monotonous upgrade system and to find the next horde of enemies to slaughter using your arsenal. This accompanies a simple and well-dosed narrative revolving around a stylized mythological fable and a journey for a magical sword, the worst bad jokes, and drops of redemption and maturity.
SW has all the necessary pieces to make an excellent game, but what prevents it from being great is that, from top to bottom, it exudes mediocrity in almost everything.
Starting with the average presentation, which, despite having some high points and being able to captivate and surprise initially, is generally unremarkable and lacks long-term appeal due to the flat lighting, the blinding atomic explosion of bloom, and the repetitive designs of environmental pieces and enemies. It starts off nice but quickly becomes dull and old.
Connected to this, the exploration, serving to pace the experience into something less tiresome, is also nothing more than “just competent”, as the level design is also of mediocre competence, limited to simplistic and linear layouts where you don't need to find your way on your own or navigate it slightly more creatively or methodically. You rarely feel like you're 'exploring' something but rather taking a few quick detours while heading towards the next golden-flashing door.
You seldom feel satisfied by finding a 'secret,' as the reward usually amounts to a small grain in the long and tedious process of purchasing mostly numerical upgrades that hardly ever change or have a significant effect on the gameplay.
You also have a practically useless jump button, rarely integrated into navigation and level design (In combat, it has little to no utility).
And the combat? The combat has so many problems. So, so many problems. It's a miracle that it's so enjoyable.
Actually, I believe it won't be for most people. It might start that way, but sooner or later, the banality catches up with most.
Where to start?
From the incompatible firerate and DPS (often unviable) of most weapons with the combat design; the fact that you're essentially playing a game where you face hordes and hordes of enemies and have to wait ages to reload weapons that lack adequate feedback to measure their efficiency; the horrible and imprecise hitboxes around enemy attacks (and yours) that will hit you even when you're visibly far from them; a useless stamina mechanic that prevents you from moving from point A to point B faster but doesn’t affect anything during combat (even on the highest difficulty); the unintuitive commands (which will become tiresome) to execute powerful attacks that you'll do continuously throughout the entire game; to the fact that you can die trying to dash from any slightly inclined surface.
Like the rest of the game's aspects, the combat works but lacks polish in almost everything. And since you're doing this practically the entire game, this lack is more keenly felt.
The thing is: if you try to play the game as an FPS (and who can blame you since most of the game's weapons are firearms?), you'll constantly exhaust your resources and patience, trying to advance through endless waves of enemies that take an eternity to die.
Think of Shadow Warrior as a hack and slash with guns.
Your katana is the strongest and most versatile weapon in the game, and the combat was built around its use. You should use it frequently and only resort to guns in specific situations, against specific enemies that usually aren't good to face at close range.
Fights where you finish without firing a shot mean you've saved resources for the next one and won't miss them when needed.
However, even after all useful upgrades are purchased, even after all weapons are unlocked, you'll never feel that enemies have the right amount of health needed for you to measure whether they are close to dying or not, if the tactics you're using are efficient or not, if those upgrades have had any effect or not.
Even after learning to maintain a consistent, incessant stream of damage and use powerful area attack combos, the damage caused often seems inconsistent. Often, it seems the enemy isn't taking damage. Sometimes, it seems suddenly the enemy is taking too much damage and dies with less than half the amount of previous attacks.
This entire process becomes increasingly tedious as you progress in the game and the quantity of combat against special enemies (precisely those that take longer to die) increases exponentially, turning your initially enjoyable and well-paced experience into possibly an exhaustive and endless hell.
It's complicated, but you learn to tolerate it. You learn to attack and accept that at some point, the enemy will die. You just never know when.
I've never seen a triple rocket launcher seem so weak.
And the boss fights? They're all horrendous. Extremely easy, slow and laborious and have nothing to do with the core of the game. No skill in the world will save you. You'll have to endure it.
In summary: enemies take an eternity to die, the feedback from damage dealt is bad, and the satisfaction of shooting doesn't compare to cutting enemies into pieces with your sword.
Moreover, what makes the game work despite everything is that it's relatively easy.
It's not a very demanding game, and the combat is a simple process of crowd control. You only need to funnel the enemies and try to hit as many of them as possible at once, staying at a safe distance while preparing for the next attack.
For better or worse, the number of enemies is small, so you're rarely hit by something you're not expecting. There are no sudden spikes.
It's extremely hard to die too. Even at the highest difficulty, the damage you receive is low, and you always have several reliable ways to regain your health (one of them being to continue attacking enemies).
That's what makes the combat tolerable. The game is rarely frustrating because of that (And you can perform quick-saves, further minimizing potential loss of time).
It lacks a good dose of balance. It lacks polish, elegance, cohesion; it lacks the game knowing exactly what it is and playing accordingly.And despite everything: it works.
Shadow Warrior Is pristine trash. And i love it.
I'm going to seek treatment now. See you soon.
P.S: The review was based on my most recent round, at "Insane" difficulty. I'm not sure if some problems remain in lower difficulties.