More revision than remake, developer Flying Wild Hog has built a brand new singleplayer shooter around the quirky hero and personality of 3D Realms’ 1997 game of the same name. The result is an FPS that will polarise its audience between new players put off by its old-fashioned, ropey and repetitive gameplay and those enamoured by its throwback nature.
Newcomers unfamiliar with the Shadow Warrior brand will find the game severely lacking by modern standards, however. The AI is sluggish and incompetent, and in a post-Dishonored world the game loop of dashing, slicing and looting feels comparatively second rate. But anyone familiar with the game’s roots will find those very same elements cause pangs of fond nostalgia as anti-hero Lo Wang quips and curses his way through fountains of blood at a relentless pace, trusty sword and sub-machinegun in hand.
The story charts Wang’s hunt for a series of mystical ancient swords, aided by a sarcastic demon sidekick who adds buddy-movie flavour with some snappy, self-aware and expectedly profane banter. Imbuing Wang with a range of supernatural powers, the developer treats him more as a supercharged eastern comic-book hero than the savage, crude inversion of James Bond he was in the ’90s. It gives the team licence to introduce some complex weapon and skill trees, too.
You improve weapons, and acquire extra skills and powers, by looting chests and finding precious Ki stones tucked away in secret areas. Your bounty is then spent – whenever you wish – in an upgrade menu, a confusing carousel of options with too many categories and intricacies; an RPG element that may be de rigeur in shooters of late, but feels sorely out of place in a game with such an old-school tempo. Even worse than the muddle of menus is the fact that upgrades don’t merely affect your skills and armoury: they affect the general flow of the game. You can improve everything from stamina recovery (crucial for sprinting, dashing and using special abilities) to the level of discoverability and frequency of extra ammo and health across the stages. It means that unless you’re willing to hop back and forth between these back-end menus frequently, tinkering with your powers and purchasing new mods (and even replenishing ammo stores directly), you’ll be at a severe disadvantage throughout. The Lo Wang of 1997 wouldn’t stand for such pace-breaking micromanagement, that’s for sure.
This design misstep aside, the bloody, beating heart of Shadow Warrior remains the same as it ever was. While firearms each have a unique feel and chunkily intimidating design (an echo of the team’s previous effort, Hard Reset) it’s Wang’s katana with which you’ll spend most of your time ending lives. Combined with a well-timed dash, the sword is the game’s most useful and unsettling instrument of death, slicing bodies up with pleasingly bloody ease.
Stages frequently honour Shadow Warrior’s corridor shooter roots, but the developer also capitalises on the power of modern PC hardware by opening stages up into sprawling spaces. When combined with the lumbering, suicidal AI, such scenes evoke the equally gory Serious Sam, as you wipe out wave after wave of demonic scum. It’s fitting, then, that Serious Sam arcade cabinets are dotted around Lo Wang’s world thanks to their shared publisher Devolver Digital.
It may not push the boundaries of the genre with its visuals, but Shadow Warrior certainly possesses moments of breathtaking beauty as you breeze through its story, your first run through which will take six to eight hours. You’ll be reminded of everything from Princess Snowblood to Otogi: Myth Of Demons as Wang pushes on through temples and perfectly pruned Oriental gardens in the twilight, and there are even shades of Tolkien and more sweeping epic fantasy in the game’s striking Shadow Realm.
As you massacre legions of clumsy and incompetent demonic foes in such stunningly realised settings, you’re frequently distracted by all the detailed beauty beyond the mayhem, and it’s a neat encapsulation of the core problem with this new take on Shadow Warrior. The fresher, more modern touches are jarring distractions rather than meaningful enhancements. This is a game at its best when it’s trying to be simple and silly, not strategic or surprising.
Flying Wild Hog has re-imagined a cult classic while maintaining Shadow Warrior’s unique personality in a shamelessly flawed and flimsy shooter concerned more with laughs and blood-letting than balance, and the team’s bold embrace of the game’s roots goes a long way to excuse the game’s problems.
Shadow Warrior is available now on Steam.
The post Shadow Warrior review appeared first on Edge Online.
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