Shadow Warrior (2013)

Classic game play, silly dad jokes. My son saw me playing this and promptly sparked up my other pc to play Shadow Warrior 2. It got him off his ps4 for the next 8 hours.

I don't have Nostalgia for the original so this will be unbiased. I definitely do think that it makes sense to make more entries in this series and I could imagine one or more of its sequels which I haven't played yet nail it. Overall it is too easy. You can basically sleepwalk through it. This is probably one of those cases where the developers so badly wanted players to experience all the content that they didn't want to risk dissuading any through excessive challenge and they went too far in the other direction. It is definitely fun using the sword which it also was in the original but here you can even chop off limbs if you cut off the dominant hand the enemy will be less effective against you but will continue attacking you similar to House of the Dead and in general very zombie-like. The various abilities and powers are pretty cool though it is too easy to get all of them unlike something like Deus Ex 1 for example. As you unlock them the idea is that this will keep you engaged but really in just minutes of playing you'll have experienced everything this really has to offer. It would be great if you could get Lo Wang and/or Hoji to stop with the snark at least briefly or honestly maybe just shut up entirely. The plot is quite thin but I did appreciate the backstory and universe. And I'm really glad that they went the soft reboot path and didn't try to make a direct sequel to the original, since if we're being honest the plot of that one wasn't amazing it didn't create as interesting a world as this does. The weapons sound significantly more memorable than they are once you start using them. Also, the levels are too open leading to a lot of frustrating backtracking. You don't get to do that much cool stuff other than combat puzzles tend to boil down to key hunts and flipping levers and such. At least the door you're headed towards does glow nicely so when that's all you got to do you can tell where to go.

Probably the best shooter of 2013

Enormous fun, great game play and lasts for a lot more than the modern shooters. A proper game that really does do justice to the original.

The most entertaining, fastest, goriest and coolest FPS game of this gen.