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Powered by Trusted Reviews Available on PC (version tested), PS4 and Xbox OneLike its much-loved predecessor, Shadow Warrior 2 seems to take us to an alternative universe where Halo and Call of Duty never happened and the FPS developed along the lines of late-’90s PC shooters. It looks bang up to date, but the core gameplay feels rooted in the glory days of Duke Nukem, Quake 2, Half-Life, Serious Sam and No-One Lives Forever. This is, in many ways, a wonderful thing. With its ludicrously intense, ultra-violent combat, daft one-liners and insatiable appetite for gore, this game from developer Flying Wild Hog is a great reminder of everything that once made the shooter so much fun.
It’s just a shame that the appeal begins to wane after the first few hours.Fans of the 2013 reboot or the 1997 original will already be comfortable with the basics. You play Lo Wang, a smart-mouthed ninja assassin in a world where pseudo-Oriental fantasy meets Chinese triad dramas meets Western sci-fi. The plot kicks off when the daughter of a crime boss, undercover in a sinister corporation’s lab, becomes possessed. A powerful magician extracts her soul from her body and places it in Wang’s, and the two join forces on a range of missions in the hope of stopping the corporation’s plans and restoring the girl to her normal state.At least, I think that’s it – after a few hours, I found the plot so utterly baffling and the missions so devoid of meaning that I’d lost all sense of what was actually going on.Related:Still, this isn’t a game of narrative but a game of action. Wang begins with his trusty katana and a magnum, then goes on collecting weapons at a furious rate, giving you a ridiculous arsenal of guns, blades, monster claws, chainsaws and handheld artillery after just a few hours into the game. Now, Wang can wield a shotgun, grenade launcher or SMG with the best of them, but what always distinguished Shadow Warrior was its obsession with melee combat.Holding back is not an option.
Make no mistake, Shadow Warrior 2 is a fast game, and when you’re overwhelmed by a Shaman, two Tumors, ten Crawlers, four Yakuza and so on, being able to duck and weave between them all in a.
Rush in, slash away, strafe left and right to dodge incoming blows. Watch as limbs divide from torsos and heads spin off into the distance. Hold and release your Alt-attack button to drive forwards through the enemy, splattering blood and gore, then use your magical powers to freeze your foes in place or knock them off their feet. Kinetic doesn’t even begin to cover it; Shadow Warrior 2 is one of the most blood-crazed, battle-mad, brawling-barmy games ever I’ve ever played.Related:There’s also more to it than you might expect. Because of the sheer, stupid number of weapons available, simply deciding which to give a place on your quick-selection wheel can be a challenge.
Beyond that, you can treat each and every one to a range of upgrades, giving them extra ammo or damage, faster reload times or a range of cool elemental effects. On top of this, Wang himself levels up, and you can spend skill points on upgrading his health, his powers of recovery and the whole gamut of melee, ranged and magical attacks.Variety is also the watchword with the enemies, with each level seeming to introduce some new form of demon, ogre, monstrous beast or vengeful creature, not to mention the spandex-clad ninjas, drones, mechs and weaponised sex dolls that populate the sci-fi areas. Different foes demand different weapons and occasionally different strategies, though you can’t really accuse Shadow Warrior 2 of ever going too big on anything that requires a functioning brain.Related:Up to a point, it’s irresistible. Despite excessive use of haze effects, Flying Wild Hog’s engine pulls off consistently impressive visuals that compare pretty well to what you’d get from a triple-A game. The music’s cool in a retro, ’90s-game-soundtrack kind of way, and Wang’s quips are occasionally funny, though a little wearing after a couple of hours.While you might wish for a few more movement options beyond Wang’s double-jumps and forward rushes, he’s a nimble and responsive ninja warrior and the combat just feels right.
Even several hours in, the action can be exhilarating and breathless, as you tackle vast hordes of goons and monsters, surviving just by the skin of your teeth. At one point Wang warns his spectral hitchhiker to prepare for a “tsunami of stupid”. He’s not kidding, but then stupid rarely feels so right.However, it’s just not the kind of game you can play for hour after hour without finding it all just a teensy bit repetitive and exhausting. After a while, one rush of monsters feels like another. Many of the missions seem to blur, with the scenery and the enemies changing, but the actual nature of the gameplay staying much the same.I suspect that some of this comes down to Flying Wild Hog’s decision to have procedurally generated levels. It’s a nice idea that means you’ll never play the same thing twice, but also prevents the kind of pacing, flow and build-up that makes a great FPS level so exciting. And when the game does depart from the formula, say, by putting you on a scavenger hunt to retrieve three missing notebooks, you can find that just getting from one to the next is a real pain.Related:There are two solutions to this.
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One is just to play Shadow Warrior 2 in smaller chunks. The other is to play it in the way its developers have hinted: as a Kung-Fu Borderlands with extra blood and gore.
Shadow Warrior 2 is the kind of game that could suit some co-op action, but its more Diablo-like mechanics aren’t as smooth or as smart as those in the Borderlands games. Managing your armoury and switching upgrades feels like hard work, while many of the ranged weapons aren’t that much fun to actually wield.
Borderlands partly works because of the balance between its snipers, tanks, assassins, gunslingers and brawlers. Shadow Warrior 2 can’t give you the same variety of play styles.And Shadow Warrior has one other problem. In a way, the 2013 reboot worked because it brought back the retro shooter style at a time when the modern, cinematic shooter was the only game in town. After years of Call of Duty, Battlefield and Halo, it felt like a breath of fresh air.
This year, however, things are different, with Doom doing the retro shooter thing with more invention, imagination, polish and style. That doesn’t make Shadow Warrior 2 any less lovable, but compare the two and it’s just not in the same class. VerdictBrilliant in hour-long doses, Shadow Warrior 2 doesn’t have the depth or variety in its core gameplay to hold your interest for hours at a time. The procedurally generated levels affect the flow and pacing of the missions, while all those ultra-violent battles become samey after a while.It still has potential as a Borderlands-style co-op shooter, while those who like the sound of a modern-looking Blood or No-One Lives Forever will find a lot to love. Yet in a year where Doom has shown how you can bring an old classic back with inventive game mechanics, Shadow Warrior 2 seems content to keep doing what it’s doing and not a whole lot more.
Features- Lo Wang delivers his own brand full throttle brutality with an expanded array of over 70 lethal blades and explosive firearms to overcome the demonic opposition.- Lo Wang delivers his own brand full throttle brutality with an expanded array of over 70 lethal blades and explosive firearms to overcome the demonic opposition.- Upgrade weapons in your arsenal with up to three stones at once to improve performance or augment them with devastating elemental effects. Collect karma, amulets, and armor to enhance Lo Wang’s power and shift his death-dealing artistry into overdrive.
Developer:Publisher:Genre:,Platforms:,Rating:Price: $39.99I have to confess that (2013) caught me by surprise. As I detailed in the Backloggery Beatdown column, underneath the veneer of a hyper-violent, nostalgic, and tawdry shooter is likely my favorite story in the past gaming generation. With the caliber of writing that would bring Shakespeare to tears, I looked forward to seeing how its sequel would amaze me. Unfortunately, what I experienced with Shadow Warrior 2 is not an evolution, but a regression. Content Guide. I pride myself on taking my own screenshots, but it is difficult to play while capturing an “action shot.” I think this is something akin to a bullshot, considering that two enemies are dying simultaneously for no reason.
Still, the game is indeed this violent.Violence: Expect levels of violence. The Road Hog Engine has been enhanced to increase the probability that Lo Wang’s hacking and slashing with his sword results in maximum gore and gibs.
The above screenshot is exemplary of this; however, it is difficult to capture while the game is in motion and looks worse than the game actually is in real-time.Lastly, a character commits s eppuku.Language/Crude Language: As Shadow Warrior fashions itself after 90’s style action movies, crude language is not merely featured, but an expectation. Lo Wang frequently limits his vocabulary to words made of only four letters so regularly, it is as though he earns a commission for using them.
Like Duke Nukem, Lo Wang is fond of one-liners and crude language, such as describing his enemies with an epithet for female genitalia, “p.ies.”. An encounter with a Dirty Old Lady Leisure, or D.O.L.L. Enemy.Sexuality: In terms of the simpler, predictable material, the anime “bathing girl” easter egg can be found in the game. An early game enemy called a D.O.L.L.
Is a pleasure robot reprogrammed to be a killing machine, though they are no less provocative. A later-game enemy called a Hata Mari is a mutant cultist who runs around with one exposed breast, making other female characters with extreme cleavage appear modest by comparison.Lo Wang meets a certain NPC, and he confesses to them that he has a girl trapped inside of his head. From here proceeds a joke about transgenderism, and the girl in his head asks him if he has told all the important people in his life, and how his transition can be stressful.Spiritual Themes: Various oni, or Japanese demons, appear as cannon fodder. Lo Wang can channel Chi as a sort of magic power. Like in Shadow Warrior (2010), Lo Wang will visit the shadow realm, which is a Japanese version of hell, to do business with some higher-level demons. A familiar name in an unfamiliar place.I jumped right into Shadow Warrior 2 expecting a reprisal of the spectacular story, and first-person gameplay that actually allows me to use a katana from the beginning to the end.
The introduction delivers. Playing as Lo Wang, I receive a mission to retrieve a macguffin, and set off to the tune of to do just that. Combat initially feels familiar; I can use my sword exclusively, dicing foes into little bits as fine and plentiful as the meat found in a tuna fish can; I can also fill enemies with lead via my revolver—which I always found an interesting first weapon—or my smg, a cool but stereotypical Yakuza-type weapon.After finishing the introduction mission that highlights gameplay mechanics like dodging, immunity to fall damage, and using Chi for healing and kinetic blasts, Shadow Warrior 2 brings me to a hub world. From this base of operations, one can purchase new weapons, buy or sell charms and trinkets for attaching to weapons to add attributes, speak with NPCs to progress the story, and acquire new missions. The world map is also accessible here, allowing me to teleport to the next destination.Not concerned about side missions or buying new weapons, or worrying about charms and such —as I am of the disposition that the best weapons in video games are found rather than purchased —I proceed to the next story mission. When I arrive at Zilla’s Labs, I am met with a message that tells me that I might not be a high enough level.
What genre is this again? What does the game mean by experience levels? Um, wut?I push forward, figuring that I could handle any difficulty spike given my vast experience in FPSes. In the first half of this level, enemies are noticeably tough—not necessarily deadly, but certainly bullet-spongy. I begin to observe that some enemies possess status modifiers such as “immune to fire.” Upon their eventual deaths, they explode into piles of treasure in addition to blood and/or circuitry depending on their carbon-based makeup.
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I run around collecting all of these goods, barely paying attention to what any of it is, and finish the level. After winning a fight, enemies explode into a bunch of collectables as if I were playing an ARPG like Diablo.Still only halfway paying attention to the story, I launch the next mission. I am immediately stonewalled by a basic enemy that inflicts major damage, yet I am unsuccessful in returning the favor. Discouraged, I remember that the game had previously reminded me that I might be “underleveled.” I exit, and try one of the side-missions.
The first concerns bullying a dealer of some sort and eliminating his handler—easy as an introduction. However, when I attempt the next mission requiring me to kill several special enemies around a Japanese garden, I am once again incapable of dealing much damage, reaching the point where I would exhaust all of my inventory’s ammunition, while killing perhaps 2/100 enemies. Left with only two impossible missions to play if I want to advance, I quit the game.Returning only after a break of several weeks, this time I explore my inventory looking for possible solutions. Some of the treasures that I had collected along the way would increase physical damage; others would add elemental damage such as cold or lighting after attaching them to my weapons. Returning to the Japanese garden mission, I actually succeed in administering damage, and carve my way through enemy combatants at a moderate pace.
What would slow me down was not necessarily the (still) bullet-spongy enemies, but the mini-bosses who become invulnerable until I kill three of their spawn to whom they were attached by chain. The game introduces this mechanic in the introduction, where a “prime” seemingly sits in meditation while connected to three or more enemies until these underlings are dispatched, and it, too, becomes susceptible to damage. Enemy stat buffs that are color-coded? What is this?Even though the combat is a dreadful grind-fest, I hoped that the story would redeem the game.
Instead, it jumps the shark at once. Lo Wang is tasked with rescuing a young woman named Kamiko from Zilla’s Labs, who has been injected with an an incapacitating substance. Her soul is then transferred over to Wang because “reasons.” Regardless of what the plot attempts to establish, Flying Wild Hog simply aimed to reproduce the Lo Wang/Hoji dynamic from the previous game.
Instead of a trickster who presents their own schemes, jokes, and off-camera, power, Kamiko simply plays the role of the annoying little sister Wang never had. Shadow Warrior 2 rubs more salt into the wound by featuring cameos by Mezu, Zing and Gozu from the prior game, and all of them are incompetent punchlines. Even worse (yes, again, the worst!) is the most dramatic makeover that I have seen for a female video game character since Nikki in her transition from Pandemonieum to Pandemonieum 2. WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO AMEONNA??? I am all for strong female protagonists, or women in games in general. But what they did to Ameonna, where she instantly transforms from maudlin to a Godfather-like figure channeling Aria T’Loak from Mass Effect, is absurd. There is no narrative explanation for this shift.With so many miscues, it might be easy to downplay Shadow Warrior 2‘s greatest strengths, including featuring since Hans Zimmer composed the theme for.
Other songs such as “,” “ ” and “” are soundtrack highlights, too, but two of these tracks are featured in the hub world rather than during action sequences, and the other is for the trailer. The graphics are also some of the best the industry has to offer. I did a double-take when I discovered that Flying Wild Hog has been using the same engine, but only upgraded, since Hard Reset (2009). This really is one of the best looking games even years removed from its initial release, but it rides too rough for me to become attached.
Shadow Warrior 2 is such a disappointment that it actually makes me angry that the developers chose to play the “long game,” banking on the theoretical longevity that a multiplayer focus allegedly provides, while offering a perfunctory, arguably malfunctional single-player experience. While its main theme is going on my music playlist forever, Shadow Warrior 2 itself will be removed from my hard drive for a comparable amount of time. This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent.
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