Shadow Warrior (2013)

This reboot is similar to games like Painkiller and Serious Sam, where enemies rush towards you from all sides in fairly big areas. It does not have much to do with the old 3D Realms Shadow Warrior, where Lo Wang was an ass kicking, dirty old man. The game is very focused on sword combat, because the guns are severely underpowered and kinda useless. Luckily slicing and dicing your way through yokai looking freaks and Zilla's henchmen is tons of fun. You have several skill trees which give you special moves and stuff like more health, shields etc. Lo Wang is a bit of a pompous a-hole, but has some nice quips like the original game. Every level has a couple of secrets, with throwbacks to the original game. The graphics still look colorful and pretty, despite showing its age. There are a lot of nice bamboo forests and Asia-inspired playgrounds ready to be soaked with the blood of your enemies. The soundtrack is pretty good too, despite it not being that memorable. What I don't like is the artificial difficulty. The developers seem to think that throwing waves of enemies at you is challenging. The further you progress, the more waves you have to defeat. They also did this in Hard Reset, so I guess they didn't learn. Also, all the chaos can become overwhelming when you slice and dice your way through hundreds of enemies at the same time. Another nitpick is that the special moves are triggered by a combination of buttons, which are hard to remember when you are in combat and being attacked from all sides. You simply do not have the time to remember a certain button combination and you can easily trigger the wrong special move, as the combinations are so similar to eachother. The boss battles are annoying, because it all comes to down to hitting certain glowing parts of their body, which can only be hit if you use the worthless shooting weapons. All in all it's a fun game that gets worse the further your progress.

Talk about big departures from original material. The game is a serviceable FPS, ironically, the guns are not the highlight of the game, every gun has a small magazine with unnecesarily long reload animations, only useful when upgraded, but not all upgrades are made equal, and the "specioal" upgrade tend to be bad i.e, akimbo for SMGs, but you have to hold a button to activate it, and the second SMG doesn't get its own clip so you end up eating through bullets twice as fast, a.k.a. reloading your gun twice as much, hardly an upgrade if you ask me. On the other hand you get the sword, which is a powerful piece of equipment, with special katana skills to further your murderous potential, there's even a skill that allows you to heal when you damage enemies with such special moves, and that's why I think the game is tailored more towards swordplay than gunmplay. However, the swordplay is not the best either, special skill are charged by double tapping a directional key, which interrupts the flow of your movement, so you'll end up soaking damage more than dodging damage, it is also unfortunate you don't get invisibility frames during the animations of these charged attacks, furthening the vicious loop of spamming charged attacks to stay alive long enough to charge another attack, and trust me, even if that sounds like an easy win combo, it is not, enemies will often outnnumber you 10 to 1 and you'll eventually die if you stand still for more than three seconds. There are also ki skills(spells) that are activated pretty much like the sword skills, double tapping a directional button, so they mostly suck too. And finally but not least, the game grades you after each encounter, and that is a sin coming from a janky piece of software. All in all, the game does a lot, but doesn't excel in anything, the saving grace is the characters, Lo Wang is no longer an usufferable stereotype, he's just an stereotype, and the story is interesting enough for you to keep going.

For most of my experience with this game, I had a lot of fun. I would rate it as high as a 4/5. But the boss fights just get super tedious. Why build a boss fight where the player has to constantly run or dash to survive and yet also tie those abilities to a stamina system? Most of the time you don't notice it, but the final "armor" fight I'll call it, is just aggravating. Constantly needing to run, heal, shoot stupid armor points on its chest and then run in and shoot crystals. You need to do this some 3 times and if you're playing on hard like I am, you'll need to open the armor up 3-4 times to destroy each crystal because while the boss is "vulnerable", he is still moving and guarding his weak point and still attacking you. Meanwhile you're dodging his AOE attacks, and running away from him when he comes to stomp you. I spent some 20 minutes fighting the guy and then failed to perform a heal once so got killed because if you get hit hard you'll die in the next attack. All that progress lost. In these sorts of boss fights, many of the weapons are useless. The Sword, Flamers and Shotguns are all close range. Crossbow bolts and Rockets have travel time and the latter has a horrendous time between firing. Heart and demon head are useless or have limited ammo. That leaves basically the pistol and PDW. The game really needs more monsters as well. When you fight a couple of invulnerable charge beasts for the third or four time it just gets annoying. You end up just running around those pieces of terrain that aren't destructible and cheap shotting them. In general I just really have a problem with boss designs where the boss is invulnerable for most of the fight. These fights just are just an aggravating waste of time. I don't want to spend most of the fight on the defensive, waiting for my artificial window to do real damage. If you want, start the fight this way, but after I make the guy vulnerable a few times KEEP him vulnerable. Break this boring loop

This game basically tries to reboot the classic Build Engine shooter by 3D Realms into a Serious Sam game, with very mixed results. The levels are about as linear as something you'd find in a modern military shooter for the Xbox 360, with what the game calls "secrets" most of the time being just barely off the beaten path. A fair amount of the levels also consist of drab industrial areas that wouldn't feel out of place in a Call of Duty game, although the more traditionally Asian areas are pretty cool. The guns are awfully weak too; the revolver is bafflingly inaccurate, the machine gun feels like a literal pea shooter, most enemies will just charge straight through your flamethrower fire and the shotgun needs multiple blasts to bring down even small enemies at point blank range. The crossbow and rocket launcher fare somewhat better, but still pale in comparison to ones from other games. The one weapon that felt consistently good was the katana, which has some pretty cool special moves and becomes especially fun to use in new game plus. All in all, I honestly came away from this game feeling pretty disappointed. It neither plays to the strengths of the classic game it tries to reboot, nor does it do a good enough job to really stand on its own.

Pros: 1. Graphics are great for a ten year old game. 2. Good dialog. (Especially between Hoji and Wang.) 3. Surprisingly good story. 4. Lots of secrets and hidden areas. 5. The writing really shines. This isn't just a 'shoot and loot'. It's a heartbreaking tragedy. 6. Realism. Lo Wang actually belts out "Ow! F**k!" when he's hit, just like you would when you stub your toe. 7. Save at any point, including partway through some cutscenes. This is GREAT when you are in a gigantic, 45 minute mob battle and don't want to start the whole thing over. Cons: 1. Cutscene stupid. One character gets away because Wang is celebrating. This happens TWICE. 2. Repetitive battles. They throw one enemy type at you. Then you see two of them in the next battle. Then three. Then swarms. Not a big deal when it's mobs, but when it's friggin' BERSERKERS it's hair raising. 3. The controls are a mess. For example, "Lstick> Lstick> Ltrigger" activates healing. Try doing that while dodging incoming enemies-- you know, the reason you're healing in the first place? 4. No explanation of how to get higher scores after battles. They say "Use different powers and weapons in combination." Okay. I used ALL of them during one battle. Every single power and every single weapon. I got 2/5 stars. WTF? 5. Some of the bosses are terribly easy. One boss vanishes when you pull out a gun because he wants to fight blade to blade. So, need a break to heal? Just swap to a pistol. There are mob battles that are harder than any of the bosses. 6. Sudden level ends mean you can't go back to search for secrets you missed. Go through the wrong door and "Boop!" Score page. "You got 2/11 secrets." 7. I hate to say this, but the GOG version causes serious overheating on my laptop. Like "Hot enough to burn your fingers WHILE it's sitting on a cooling deck. I had to buy and play it on the Xbox to write this review. This and SW2 are the only GOG games that do this. 3.5/5 Stars.