I'll keep it short: The game is all about playing through excellent, fun and fluid combat space missions. It even has a kind of a story that successfully holds the missions together and even player choices in some of them that changes the way the mission then plays. Oh, and no bugs or crashes. Enjoy.
Well, the good elements of the game are true effort, nice and somtimes beautiful scenery, not-holding-your-hand attitude, harsh environment to survive in and a good story. The not so good elements of this game are the kind you would want to consider when making your decision whether to buy it or not, because each one will accompany the entire playthrough: First of all, the grind... the game world is devided to areas (i.e maps) of distinctive themes, which is good, but in each of them there are only a handful of different enemy units that constantly repeats in the many dozens of encounters for the given area. that makes the combat part very, very repetative and ultimatly boring. Second, the charater development and ability points available for it throughout a playthrough is way too limiting to be a fun to play with, which complements badly to combat and grind mentioned above. Third, what a wierd way to implement a story to a game. the story is basically revieled in segments of exposition, followed by 4 completely identical segments which left me with the impression of copy->paste for the story layer, followed by the epilog which is a wopping 10! minutes of voice narration over images. In other words, you spend close to all of the playthrough - many dozens of hours, obviosly - advancing very litte in story and when you can't play anymore they dump a bucket of concertrated, branching and interesting story that can hold nicly as a backbone for 3 fair games... for a game that prides itself of its oldschool approach and marketed as such, this was a distinctively negative accord to end with. In conclusion, for me the experiance was of a game that had a lot of the right things going for it yet lacked tremendiosly in execution decisions, balance and interst. Btw, my time playing the game was completely bugs free.
Shadow Warrior dx11 surprised me with an interesting story written with quality in mind, good dialogues, exellent voice acting, beautiful graphics, orchastrated soundtrack, meaningful skill tree and upgrades, nice humour and close to flowing combat mechanics. The only wrinckle indeed is about an aspect of the combat mechanics due to the somewhat awkward method to activate powers, yet its impact on the overall experiance is close to negligible. As a personal preference, strict Shooters is a game genre that I typically avoid, so this game is a refreshingly positive experience to have.
