A personal favourite among the old Build-engine games and the one I keep returning to from time to time. The game is a marriage of outlandish humour and brutal violence featuring a 3D Realms trademark action hero with a strong personality with all the quirks. One that was way beyond the correct taste in its time and even more so today! Master Ninja Assassin Lo Wang did some things cartoonishly bonkers way in one sense and others with superb precision and ruthlessness. Voice actor John Galt and the crew creating the game clearly had a lot of fun, and didn't take things too seriously. The game itself: one of the last times the matured Build-engine, just before the advent of 3D-accelerator cards and about the time the powerful Pentium 2 came about, delivered a world created around Asian stereotypes of movies, anime and manga, with the creators putting all their love and frustration to the mix. This can be seen for example in the game art where many have later on discovered, for example, that the anime/manga posters among other things, are based on real ones, maybe the ones the crew were watching at the time. The levels had perhaps the most diverse environments of all the build engine games and also compared to many true 3D-games of the period too. Whether it be a battleship, a monastery, a sky temple, industrial areas or forests, the Shadow warrior had it all. The game tied Japanese high technology to all around Asian mystic past, just the way one who has watched too much anime, Asian themed movies and 1980's action flicks would have in the mid 1990's. It required a few more years for the full 3D-engines to deliver the same amount detail this game had. If one likes the 90's build engine games the likes of Duke Nukem, Blood or Redneck Rampage, I would recommend to try this as well. A word of advice: The game might feel a bit crankier, if one has gotten used to the modern mouse aiming. If so, the Build-engine game to try first is the Excellent Ion Fury of Voidpoint!
