I LOVE Shadow Warrior, both the original and now this new one. The great thing about this game is, like it's predecessor, it holds true to having great gameplay AND keeping you engaged with some awesome dialogue. This game has some awesome Shadow Warrior style jokes, but doesn't try and rely entirely on that to keep people playing the game. The combat system is really great, it does an amazing job of making use of the Katana Sword, which you'd think in a shooter would be just a weapon you'd use when you run out of ammo. Where as even with full ammo, I found myself using the Katana just for the fun factor.
Whether your new to the series, or someone like myself who played the original, I'd strongly recommend this game.
An overall good game of the "old-school" design. It has its frustrations and isn't a genre defining classic or anything, but it's a fun time for a while.
Pros:
+Good voice acting. It's cringey, foul, and juvenile at times, but of good quality.
+Runs good on modern systems. Ran natively in ultrawide resolution on my screen.
+Lots of weapons.
+Interesting level-up system for Lo Wang and upgrades for your weapons.
+Fairly sizable levels that stay interesting despite being linear.
+A few epic boss fights with huge bosses.
+Surprisingly interesting story line.
Cons:
-Despite there being plenty of weapons, most of them feel a little unspectacular. Not bad; just unimpressive.
-Too many ridiculous arena fights. Especially later in the game after it has run out of new enemies, it will just throw wave after wave of every enemy in the game at you before letting you proceed. It's a time waster and artificial difficulty spike.
-Speaking of time wasters, the game lasts a bit too long. I spent 13 hours beating it and I was ready for it to end after 8-10 hours.
-Ending is a bit anticlimactic. Maybe they're saving something for the sequel.
It ran mostly stable; I think I had one crash to desktop. Also, the ending cutscene was unintentionally funny since Lo Wang's head wasn't rendered; only a set of floating eyes and teeth. This isn't the kind of game that I'll ever go back and play a second time through. But I did enjoy my time with it for the most part and I'm looking forward to playing Shadow Warrior 2 after a little break. I recommend it on sale or for fans of old-school style shooters.
Talk about big departures from original material. The game is a serviceable FPS, ironically, the guns are not the highlight of the game, every gun has a small magazine with unnecesarily long reload animations, only useful when upgraded, but not all upgrades are made equal, and the "specioal" upgrade tend to be bad i.e, akimbo for SMGs, but you have to hold a button to activate it, and the second SMG doesn't get its own clip so you end up eating through bullets twice as fast, a.k.a. reloading your gun twice as much, hardly an upgrade if you ask me.
On the other hand you get the sword, which is a powerful piece of equipment, with special katana skills to further your murderous potential, there's even a skill that allows you to heal when you damage enemies with such special moves, and that's why I think the game is tailored more towards swordplay than gunmplay. However, the swordplay is not the best either, special skill are charged by double tapping a directional key, which interrupts the flow of your movement, so you'll end up soaking damage more than dodging damage, it is also unfortunate you don't get invisibility frames during the animations of these charged attacks, furthening the vicious loop of spamming charged attacks to stay alive long enough to charge another attack, and trust me, even if that sounds like an easy win combo, it is not, enemies will often outnnumber you 10 to 1 and you'll eventually die if you stand still for more than three seconds.
There are also ki skills(spells) that are activated pretty much like the sword skills, double tapping a directional button, so they mostly suck too.
And finally but not least, the game grades you after each encounter, and that is a sin coming from a janky piece of software.
All in all, the game does a lot, but doesn't excel in anything, the saving grace is the characters, Lo Wang is no longer an usufferable stereotype, he's just an stereotype, and the story is interesting enough for you to keep going.
For most of my experience with this game, I had a lot of fun. I would rate it as high as a 4/5. But the boss fights just get super tedious. Why build a boss fight where the player has to constantly run or dash to survive and yet also tie those abilities to a stamina system? Most of the time you don't notice it, but the final "armor" fight I'll call it, is just aggravating. Constantly needing to run, heal, shoot stupid armor points on its chest and then run in and shoot crystals. You need to do this some 3 times and if you're playing on hard like I am, you'll need to open the armor up 3-4 times to destroy each crystal because while the boss is "vulnerable", he is still moving and guarding his weak point and still attacking you. Meanwhile you're dodging his AOE attacks, and running away from him when he comes to stomp you. I spent some 20 minutes fighting the guy and then failed to perform a heal once so got killed because if you get hit hard you'll die in the next attack. All that progress lost.
In these sorts of boss fights, many of the weapons are useless. The Sword, Flamers and Shotguns are all close range. Crossbow bolts and Rockets have travel time and the latter has a horrendous time between firing. Heart and demon head are useless or have limited ammo. That leaves basically the pistol and PDW.
The game really needs more monsters as well. When you fight a couple of invulnerable charge beasts for the third or four time it just gets annoying. You end up just running around those pieces of terrain that aren't destructible and cheap shotting them.
In general I just really have a problem with boss designs where the boss is invulnerable for most of the fight. These fights just are just an aggravating waste of time. I don't want to spend most of the fight on the defensive, waiting for my artificial window to do real damage. If you want, start the fight this way, but after I make the guy vulnerable a few times KEEP him vulnerable. Break this boring loop
This game basically tries to reboot the classic Build Engine shooter by 3D Realms into a Serious Sam game, with very mixed results. The levels are about as linear as something you'd find in a modern military shooter for the Xbox 360, with what the game calls "secrets" most of the time being just barely off the beaten path. A fair amount of the levels also consist of drab industrial areas that wouldn't feel out of place in a Call of Duty game, although the more traditionally Asian areas are pretty cool. The guns are awfully weak too; the revolver is bafflingly inaccurate, the machine gun feels like a literal pea shooter, most enemies will just charge straight through your flamethrower fire and the shotgun needs multiple blasts to bring down even small enemies at point blank range. The crossbow and rocket launcher fare somewhat better, but still pale in comparison to ones from other games. The one weapon that felt consistently good was the katana, which has some pretty cool special moves and becomes especially fun to use in new game plus. All in all, I honestly came away from this game feeling pretty disappointed. It neither plays to the strengths of the classic game it tries to reboot, nor does it do a good enough job to really stand on its own.
