(From Steam version, 52h) If you love Shadow Warrior but hate Borderlands then just stick with SW1. Being more fast paced and mobile than it's predecessor thanks to the more open environments, the removal of stamina and fall damage, greater variety of weapons, all exquisitely animated, fantastic audio-visual feedback and improved controls, you'd think it was just bigger and better but the eventual deal breaker for me was the constant interruptions: 1) Story: Alarm bells began ringing when, near the start, Kamiko stops Wang getting into his car to inform him she can just teleport us where we need to go and sure enough, the entire game consists of teleporting back and forth between the hub and the same two or three copy-pasted play pens, be it main or side-missions, which kills the pacing and what little investment I had, gives no sense of progress or momentum and leads to an ending I found abrupt and unsatisfying. 2) Gems: Having to constantly pause the game to scroll through a long list of boring stat-increasing gems just to check and incrementally upgrade all three slots of all nine weapons (Not even counting those not on the wheel!) just to try and stop enemies taking too many hits to kill only caused me whiplash and made it harder over time to get back into that shooter trance. As a result, each victory only made me sigh in frustration. Plus the colour-coding is useless since it's all too likely for those "legendary" reds that that boss just dropped to turn out worse than your common blues, probably because it got minus damage as one of it's downsides! The only interesting ones were the alternate - or should I say "replacement" - fire modes but since using them would mean sacrificing an actual damage gem, they went unused. I completed the game (on hard, just for the "better" drops) feeling nowhere close to satisfied due to the aforementioned whiplash. This game could have been fantastic but Borderlands and Diablo's influences have rendered it merely "okay".
First and foremost, this game (like so many others!) breaks the cardinal sin of space game design by making interstellar travel hopelessly dependent on what I like to call "cosmic convenience", which in this case is a convenient network of wormholes that just happens to connect the star systems together. What annoys me even more is the fact that NPC's talk about this bullshit logistical weakness totally straight-faced; on the level where you first witness the "interplanetary drive" in action, the lead scientist on board your ship spouts something along the lines of "that should not be possible!", to which my response would be to throw him out the airlock and tell him to go to Egosoft, where he belongs! The game claims to feature "realistic planetary orbits" which, in practice, is only ever seen on the between-mission briefing screens because stellar objects are nothing but skybox textures in actual gameplay, which gives you a great sense of going NOWHERE! In combat, your control over the ships under your command is bar-of-soap-in-bath loose at best because the AI keeps forgetting your orders, forcing you to reiterate them every 5 seconds but even when they're carried out, they're done so as vague suggestions instead of direct orders. Then there are the piss-weak, lacklustre, rock-paper-scissors weapons that just make battles drag on and on until their exact firing rhythm gets stuck in your head. There's also very little imagination in the ship models, a fair few of which are just blatantly ripped off from Babylon 5! The only enjoyable moment of this game, for me, was when I saw my douche-bag admirals' ship get destroyed, until I found out in the next briefing that the arrogant sod had survived. It was around that time that I'd had enough of this rubbish and called it a day.
