Remember all the things you liked about Shadow Warrior 1? The great level design; the varied weapon types, where none of the weapons are useless; the great writing and the banter between Lo Wang and Hoji; the intelligently designed enemy types; the relatively few, but interesting, spells and abilities you can level up . Well, that's all gone now. Instead you get big randomized levels with no thought put into them, a million different weapons, all equally ineffectual, no Hoji (instead you get a new sidekick who is not funny, talks much too much, and she and Lo Wang simply seem to hate each other for the whole game, with no chemistry between them), every enemy is a big dumb tank with too much HP, and now you have dozens of skills that are like +5% poison damage, or whatever, instead of anything interesting. Shadow Warrior 1 (the reboot one) is a model of how a "retro" style single-player FPS should be. Shadow Warrior 2 is a terrible mistake- a sub-Borderlands loot-em-up type FPS (at least Borderlands had designed levels and interesting skill trees) that is so overlong and dull, with so little effort put into the writing and design, that it feels like a poor MMO. Why this is is a mystery to me, but I just hope Flying Wild Hog manage to get back to whatever it was they were clearly doing right on the first game (and even on Hard Reset, which is not a great game, but which is much better than SW2).
