Shadow Warrior 2

IMHO great sequel to the 2013 reboot Pros - GRAPHICS (like WOW - from models, to settings, textures etc.) - great, stable engine - interactivity (U can destroy looots of things) - humor - ArtStyle - many different settings - open nature with possibility to revisit locatons - hub - level design - original enemies design Cons - undercooked weapon stats mechanincs (which is overwhelming and boring at the same time) - weapons lacking punch far too often - Sci fi levels being sometimes hard too look at (reflections, overbrights etc) - post process effects galore (again, making it hard for the eyes) - boring cutcenes - as with 2013 SW, very poor face animations

The game is satisfyingly smooth to play, guns now are a viable alternative to the sword, with a lot of weapon variants to choose, and an upgrade system that allows certain degree of customization, sword play has improved too, sword skills only require a directional input instead of double tap, this makes a world of difference, spells have a dedicated button for each one, again, big improvement, with a decent amoount of passive skills to further your murderous potential. And get this, there's no fall damage , no stamina and no recovery time between sword skills. My favorite change tho: The game doesn't rate your "performance" after each fight. All these changes make the moment to moment gameplay enjoyable and you will play until you get tired of goring demons, and believe me, you will get tire of it because... The game is no longer a linear experience with carefully crafted levels, it is in all intent and purposes, a looter shooter, is built to get you into a loop of revisiting zones to farm loot to get minimal increments on stats and repeat endlesssly, nothing encapsulates this better than the masamune orbs, a rare curerncy used to upgrade the base stats of weapons and purify charms from negative effects, this processes are prohibitely expensive, but again, the game will only throw a few orbs your way each time. It sounds boring, and it is because there are only three distinctive biomes. Finally, Lo Wang is an insufferable prick this time, he throws insults and sarcasm at everything that breathes, and his relationship with his coprotagonist is antagonistic at best, which makes the ending more jarring than anything else. In the end, the game made big improvements on the combat, but the story and the narrative are weak, stretched thin in a bloated pustule of content. My advice is to only do the side missions that give skills and ignore the rest, no matter how enjoyable the combat is, you want to spend as little time as possible with this game.

First of all the game is optimized wonderfully. I play with no lag or frame rate loss at all, all settings on max on a laptop I bought for $800 almost 2 years ago. The only game that comes as close to being this smooth that I have played is the newer Tomb Raider. The environments are beautiful. All of the grass and leaves and branches move in the wind and look amazing. The attention to detail is amazing. For instance in the strip club, the shiny stage had realistic smudge marks on it when the light glinted off of it and the pole had fingerprints all over it. Just as the previous games the combat is not only fast paced, gory, and brutal... but it is just plain satisfying and fun. There’s nothing like busting through a wall with your chainsaw, using shift to rush up to an enemy, then watching in slightly slow motion as your saw runs up the middle up your twitching enemy, their screams shuddering from the vibrations and blood, intestines and crimson gushes going everywhere. Get this game. You will love it

The remake of Shadow Warrior in 2013 was a pleasant surprise and more or less everything that made it good is still there. It's just total fun to chop your way through demons, using chi power and listening to Wang's cocky remarks. It looks great, the controls are perfectly done, the weapons are diverse and feel just right, level/world design is great with lots of destructibles and the story is somewhat interesting. The game design is now "hub based". So it's not really open world, but you can start (side) missions in any order and you can even go back to side missions to roam freely. While this is fine, the problem is that there are only a very few different locations which are heavily (!) reused. For all main, side and bounty hunt missions plus all the trials I needed 33h, but I feel the main story line would've been just a few hours and almost everything else was playing through the same few levels again. You could say that I wasn't forced to play all the repetitive bounty hunt missions, but even the side quests and some story quests reuse the same levels. Personally, I think they also overdid the whole powerup thing. There are literally hundreds of weapon powerups and dozens of weapons and chi powers and towards the end you can even craft/modify powerups, but there's just not enough game to justify all this and I wish they had invested the time and money in some additions levels. Then there are quite a few bugs like treasure chests automatically placed in rooms/buildings you can't access. I got stuck several times (needed to teleport out and start another mission), fell through the floor and the game once froze completely. Plus not all the cars are destructible. Last but not least, while the graphics look great, the faces and facial animations are not really state of the art. And well, there's no savegame handling whatsoever. Still, I loved playing it most of the time, it's just that seeing the same levels over and over again was a bit of a letdown.

This is a completly different game to serious sam - I know. The problem for me is that the battles are so long. In the - I guess last mission - the "large enemies" have a shield mode where you have to kill the guards that protect his life bar (like most large boss like enimies). It slows down the movement speed or the momentum of completing / getting to the end from 100% to 0. The later weapons are getting better. Katana, Chainsaw and Shotgun are the best imo but everything especially the handgun are feeling weak af. Maybe it is because the game or gun handling is more tuned for consoles?, but everything feels strange to me. I am not saying the game is bad but this feels like a Metroid-vania game stretched into 3D and that is not my type of game. I love Doom, (Fear), Return To Castle Wolfenstein and Serious Sam... I would compare the health of the enemies to Wolfenstein enemies / or half life 1 grunts with at least 3 times the hp points and 2 stages until they die. So the GAME is great but only objectivly and it ripps my i5 3550 with 3,9Ghz @4/4 Cores with GTX970. Mainly the CPU gets rekt and this game uses 2D backgrounds xD