Shadows: Awakening

Great game. Loved every aspect of it. Unique gameplay. Havent had that much fun in a long time, if you want challenging game play it on hard or even extreme - not recommended till you finish it for the first time. Worth every penny.

The most noticeable feature of this game is traversing between the realm of mortals and the realm of shadows. It is used a lot and very well. Locations are well crafted and fun to explore and you have to explore them in both worlds to unravel all of their secrets. The game is filled with puzzles most of which are quite good, being both challenging and fair. They will require both wit and attentiveness. Secondary quests are quite good for an action-RPG and are well written and fun to do. Game knows how to reward the player and not everything comes down to loot. The game keeps being fun and offering good challenge in terms of puzzles and combat up to the very end. But not everything is great. Controls make it difficult to act precisely, which sometimes causes issues both in combat and time-sensitive puzzles. UI is for sure optimized for a gamepad and is a major regression from the original Shadows -- Heretic Kingdoms. I didn't like some of the plot decisions, particularly the ending of Chapter 3(no spoilers, but be prepared for something really off), but aside from that everything is mostly in line. In terms of game mechanics skill system seems to be quite unbalanced, there are several reasons for that: 1) Earlier skills are a lot weaker than later ones, even if you max them out 2) You can use only three skills simultaneously 3) There are far too many skill-points All of these combined lead to several problems: 1) You are forced to change your skill set once in midgame just because old ones do not work anymore 2) There is no real variety in regard of skills 3) By the end of the game you will have a lot of excess skillpoints that you'll spend on skills you end up never using

I got stuck at one of the first quests called the hairloom. The npc that was supposed to drop the iron key didnt drop anything. i watched a guide and i did everything right. Please fix it. Thanks

This is not a Path of Exile or Diablo clone. This is mostly story driven ARPG where player has differentt kind of customization of their combat skills by selecting "puppets" to carry in the combat. These puppets are fallen heros that your devourer demon... devours. Yet still story, narrative and setting is really what drives this game. And that is something I think is a missed opportunity. Player can have a demon and 3 puppets active at all times but for the story purposes, all puppets are present for banter. In that regard I think they could have done more as there is huge potencial as some puppets have history together or have specific point of view onthe situation. Switching between normal and shadow mode is instant and works great. It is the key mechanic of the game and player should use that and abuse that in the combat. I have played as my main puppet Evia and I must say I really didn't like the way they handled how she died. It is lame but everything else was beautiful. Playing with a different main puppet offers quite different experience and same locations offer different quests thus feeling different. I highly recommend.

I sincerely loved this game, I was completely baffled by how much fun had throughout my 3 playthroughs. The concept of swapping between your party members in just 1 body felt smooth and fresh in comparison to the regular 4 walking bodies. Some major thinking and quick button pressing was involved during fights to get those 4 man combos rolling out efficiently, which was pretty fun and flashy. The story is fine, with some funny dialogues here and there, plenty of side quest and it offers at 3 solid playthroughs since each of the 3 playable characters has its own story line and offers a different perspective into the core story. Thr RPG aspect is perhaps the weakest point of this game, even though there are many party members to choose from, each with its own array of skills, the game doesn't offer much in terms of customization, by this i mean that from all the stats available, only a handful of them are useful, regardless if you are gearing a mage, warrior or ranger, and the problem is that the items required for upgrading your gear are random and limited, so its only possible to fully gear 1 character, maybe 2 if you are lucky with the drops and gear doesn't really matter too much in terms of damage, therefore you can complete the game with your starter gear. Another fun aspect of the game are it's puzzles, which are just hard enough to make you think a little bit and usually provide some sort of decent gear Summary: + Great combat mechanics (positioning is quite important) + Replayable fun story (took me 90 hours to beat the game 3 times for all achievements) + Fun puzzles - Poor/frustrating gearing mechanics. Overall i'd say is a must have if you like ARPG's