Shadow Warrior 2

Game released best of this type of games 2015-2016. the combat system, the pace, the complexity , all at the proper level. The plot is a bit far but that's okay, it's not the Witcher 3. Your money pays completely. Аnd yes soundtrack final boss chic!!!!

Shadow Warrior 2 can be compared to Borderlands in terms of gameplay. You shoot stuff, you loot lots of stuff, run through randomly generated maps, upgrade stuff and there are many jokes. -The combat system is great. It works smoothly and actually conveys the feeling of being a powerful ninja. The abilities work well with the various weapons. The melee system has a strange behaviour when it comes to chopping people. You will realize, that clicking the button 10 times to rampage with your sword will result in 3-8 hits, if you are lucky. Also, many enemies can kick you back and may keep doing it over and over, when you try to get into melee range. -90% of the drops (ammo excluded) consist of gems with different abilities. There is basically no variation to them, except numbers and a few firing modes. The remaining 10% are random lore collectibles and fortune cookies. -The "randomly generated maps" are vast. Unfortunately, the tiles of a few different biomes are recombined for every new mission, which leads to playing very similar forest/cityhub levels. The enemy density varies from hordes of monsters on every step to nothing, but humping rabbits for 3 kilometers. There are secrets, although they are not really worth collecting, since they always reward you with a bit of coins without further comment or variation (some sort of buddha statues). -The humour is pretty bad. Not even the 90s-kinda-bad. Most of Wang's lines make you cringe, the dialogues are flat and the enemies are desperately trying to insult you and your Wang. Nevertheless, the game is really fun to play. The environment looks gorgeous, the physics work flawlessly with room for funny ragdoll moments. The pretty one-dimensional loot system still makes you addicted and boss fights are usually rewarding. SW2 could use more enemies and some other useful things than gems, but if you are looking for a relaxed weekend ninja massacre, this is the game for you.

Sure, the game has got Wang's great commentary and the combat is good. But... Do yourself a favor and don't explore. There's no reason to. Just go to where the checkpoint is and move on. The rest of the "open world" is just filler with nothing to expand the universe or story. Shadow Warrior is better as a linear based shooter. Going into a free roam open world style like this just degrades the whole experience. Where as the first game (the remake) was able to craft an expertly creative and inventive world by having you go through specific worlds and corridors; this game just has you go on what is essentially fetch quests. And on your way to the fetch, they throw in some random enemies. There is no real thought behind the gameplay or the enemy placement. The worlds are empty and void. The combat, while still good, just lacks the intensity and creativity of the original. They throw like 20 randomly generated enemies at you while you go to your quest. There's no reason to have an open world where no matter which route you go through to get to the item ends up being exactly the same. It's just a waste of space. A waste of time.

There are moments when this game is fun, but too often they are interupted by bad design: 1)Mission in same region share maps, so you will be moving through same 3-4 enviroments, visiting same spots. 2)Agro range on roaming mobs is kind of broken, often many groups are attracted to you during fight resulting in gank. 3)Most upgrade tokens are trash, vasting your time selling/crafting. 4)Weapon upgrades are mostly elemental damage focused, on its own not bad, but in combination with how often mobs have various resists, means that quite often some of your weapons will randomly become useless. At any time you can change upgrades, but how fun is spending most of the fight in menu. 5)Melee combat is super shallow and clunky. Standard attacks are just mindless slashes, which sometimes enemy decides to block. Special attacks are controled by movement keys, so if you want to perform attack that doesn't match your current movement, you have to temporarly change diraction. There is also block button, it works in 1v1, but 99% of fights are againts groupsso it is pointless to use.

Summary: A great game when it's on sale. Having enjoyed the previous game is not a guarantee you'll like this one. There's a lot of good humour and character interaction, but it's also the most interesting part of the game and much of the rest is poorly done. There's no denying SW2 was trying to capitalise on Borderlands' success. Everything that's supposed to make the core game more interesting is making it worse. Details would be lengthy writing. The RPG elements are not done well, to the point of being annoying. There's no sense of a coherent world. You're teleporting to where you need to be. Not an open world game, but it's using gameplay and story progression mechanics which you'd expect from one. That could have been justified by having amazing shooting galleries, but the level design is bad. Enemies aren't doing the game any favours either. There's few types and they're either reskinned, or upgraded. Objectives are very repetitive and for that reason I skipped the bounties. Aside from the main story, there are trivia which you collect throughout the game. There's a ton of them and most are interesting. The question is whether the game gets you invested enough to actually read them. Characters are great and I wanted to see their story unfold. Unfortunately, the game is not delivering the story effectively and character development seems forced. The best parts of the game are interactions between characters and the protagonist, and to be completely honest, it was the only thing that kept me going. By the end of the game, I was not enjoying the gameplay very much, I was skipping any enemies I could, and all I wanted was to see how it all turns out. *****MILD SPOILERS AHEAD**** And it did not turn out good. The ending is a cliffhanger, and a rather confusing one at that. I lost much respected for the developers. It's just not something you do unless you have a guaranteed plan to deliver more content immediately, and today it's safe to say they didn't.