Shadow Warrior 3: Definitive Edition

I was surprised of how fun and cool Shadow Warrior 2 was. I rated it five stars whitout a doubt. The story wasn't exactly good, but I just found the game itself very funny, it's full of action, great colors. the grinding process is cool, weapon upgrades are so many, the way the weapons looked was awesome. The game just starts off with a bang right away, really enjoy it. But then I tried SW3. after 1 hour playtime, I just wanted to refound it. It isn't fun, it isn't good looking, it hasn't had any nice action packed tunes. it looks so cartoonish. No, that purchase was a real bummer.

The guns were awesome, katana was functional but not overpowered, like the arena combat (almost like Unreal Tournament.. ishish) and enviromental hazards.. for demons. You could say it borrowed mechanics from Doom Ethernal.. but here they work better, and not like Doom Maternal having two creative directors fighting each other. Graphics are beautiful and busy.. but somehow I was not getting overwhelmed by them. Runs perfectly on my 1660ti Max-Q. Nice to have options for subtitles and captions. Oh.. and we have Hoji back and non-clifhanger ending. Demn yeah!

The core of this game is incredible, the combat is super fast paced and it can be really stressful in a good way, with a lot of stuff to balance like ammo, health and your magic yellow juice used to instakill enemies. The weapons are all fun, I found each one to be useful, with none of them being able to instakill a boss with super rare ammo which is nice, I like each weapon being equally useful. The combat does take a lot of design philosophies from doom eternal but changes small things to make what I think is a better core combat system over doom eternal. I like how one of the first upgrades in the game gives you ammo whenever you melee an enemy, basically like d2016m or eternal's chainsaw, but without the slowing down of pace that d2016m had. I won't go over everything in the combat because there are a lot of systems and small things to talk about, but overall know that the core combat is incredible. There are lots of issues with this game though... For one, the bosses suck. There are no smaller enemies around to get ammo or health from, meaning you need to rely on the respawning ammo and health pick ups. This is okat for ammo but health only spawns like once a minute and only heals you about half a boss attack on hard. I lowered the difficulty to normal whenever fighting a boss, but I wish I could have kept playing on hard, maybe having lots of small enemies around to act as little health pinatas. The game is really short which I didn't love, for my first playthrough I played on hard and it was less than 7 hours even when for the first half of the game I died quite a bit. I don't mind this, I think the game is actually a great length, just the price is probably too high for what is a 5-7 hour game, maybe 10-14 hours if you play it twice. This game was really fun but didn't last too long and the bosses sucked. It's definetly worth getting on sale but I won't remember it in a few years. It's fun but not very substantial.

Really a 4 star game, but I feel the need to "offset" a bit with this one. First off, yes, the game is fairly short. I understand why people who paid more than $20 feel slighted, especially since it seems there wasn't a NG+ mode originally. By design this isn't going to offer as much gameplay as the Borderlands-esque SW2 (though I feel you get just as much enemy and environment variety in this one - but it has been awhile) I don't mind games like this being short (I paid $20, but I don't think I would've cared at $40 or so) since they can get exhausting if they drag on. I petered out on Serious Sam 4, for example, where this kept me engaged the whole time. It moves. The game is colorful, the enemy design is fun, the guns feel great, the tweak to the DOOM 2016 formula where "glory kills" get you a limited use weapon is neat. The platforming is never frustrating and is over quickly. The writing is juvenile but it got a smirk out of me a few times. To sum up, it could've been a whole lot more given more developement time but what's here looks and feels great to me.

It's Shadow Warrior. I knew what I was getting into. I can't even fault the one liners for being terrible because I knew they would be. I laughed despite myself. It was short, but any longer and it would have overstayed its welcome. It was a blast and now it's time to try the other gameplay modes. Good game, make more like it and I'll buy more.