Flying Hog are the guys behind Hard Reset, which I reviewed back here. Long story short, I didn't really fall in love with Hard Reset as I had hoped, instead finding the game sort of a mishmash of elements I really liked and elements I intensely disliked. That being said, indie titles from guys just getting together for the first time often have sharp edges that another game or an expansion will smooth the edges off. Shadow Warrior is the same basic genre, and possibly much the same engine, but built off the idea of taking one of the worst racist stereotypes in 90s gaming and treating it seriously.
Man, is that weird or what? Duke Nukem was and is sort of a mess, but the original Shadow Warrior was just creepy racism wrapped around Duke Nukem and the build engine. I'd heard it was quite good, but I've also heard if you're over 15 you tend to cringe a little too much for all the casual racism.
Shadow Warrior (2013) may or may not feel racist to individuals of actual Japanese background; I'm not going to pretend all the art and shinto stylings in the game might not do so, so you'll forgive me if I'm wrong. But as a white dude playing a game about a Japanese doom action hero named Lo Wang, it feels like a very legitimate attempt, albeit with some very trope visual choices. Lo Wang himself actually comes off as a very Deadpool character, in fact, with a little wiggling and a few small changes you could probably have made this in a Deadpool's adventures in glorious Nippon FPS game instead.
One thing that stands out, when it comes to Shadow Warrior is ... the menus. Seriously! There's lots of little animated touches that make them look like a high quality production in a neat manner. The game has in-engine cinematics as well as hand drawn ones, as well, and both those also look great. I'm not exactly certain where Shadow Warrior's budget lies, but the game's engine is just gorgeous and shows a lot of talent. It doesn't look quite as "samey" as other shooters, there's a lot of creative enemy design and the levels just look fantastic. It is possible there are better "effects" I could be seeing if I had a more up to date video card, but I honestly think this is the best looking shooter I've ever played.
There's this great looking level where you're on a docks and its storming a little, waves crashing over the side, rain coming down. A little hard on the visibility, sure, but as visuals go its just fantastic. I was also really impressed at the variety in the levels, I don't want to spoil some of the elements, but the game is really willing to be extremely awesome looking in very different ways. It does sort of wrap back around itself in terms of the motif of some of the early levels and later levels, but regardless it uses a lot of settings that rely more on the quality of art than the limits of the engine.
Audio quality is interesting in Shadow Warrior. The dialogue and quips are excellent, with banter between Lo Wang and various characters, including the interesting sidekick character who I won't spoil. The music though is a bit strange - It feels like there should be both more and less of it, in different parts. It rarely seemed to quite work, which was odd, because the quips were almost perfectly timed over and over. Gun sounds are good, and the enemy monsters make a lot of interesting noises that sound close enough to speech but aren't quite to work well.
A surprising high point to Shadow Warrior is - and I almost can't believe I'm saying this - the quality of the story and writing. It isn't high class art or something, but it's legitimately interesting and pardoning a little bit of a rush when it came to certain aspects of Lo Wang's decisions, I really found myself enjoying the story. The cut scenes, both in engine and 2nd painted ones, are enjoyable. Lo Wang himself wasn't some amazing character, but he didn't blunder through things or act like an archetypical dolt. He's pretty crazy, but it makes sense. You'd have to be crazy to do the things Lo Wang does. Of course, the characters around him were interesting, and the demon characters came off as both sympathetic yet properly stupid. There is a mechanic in play that makes the back story work better for the purposes of having the sidekick be sort of a gentle advisor at the start, yet still have a big enough role in the story to be personally invested.There's a good balance. Also you can skip everything, all the time, even little things like cutscenes for falling off a roof - you can skip that. It's funny, they took the care to let you skip everything, but almost never actually did.
Enemy design, like I said, is visually fantastic. You are introduced to enemies slowly over time and all of them have pretty unique behaviors. There's only one enemy I would remove from the game, which is pretty good when compared to Hard Reset where I think the game's enemy design was 75% terrible. Other than that, they're all inspiring and inspired designs that look fantastic in motion. Additionally, enemies can or be coerced to enrage, and enraging further changes up their visuals. You may not even notice all of the little animations they have in the heat of battle - foes can be burnt, lose limbs, knocked down or change their moods. Sometimes they seem no longer interested in the fight, other times they use some move you didn't even realize they had, or fight on with one arm, or knock each other over. The dismembering thing is really novel, as the game doesn't just let you blow an enemy's arm off, if he or she used that arm for something, they no longer have access to that skill. There is something of a tactical choice against the larger enemies to lean on their right or left, to deny them access, since it may take another third or half of the fight to finish them off entirely.
Enemy design is a little wonky in terms of what they actually do, though this is generally more a matter of spectrum than binary. There are legions of shaman like enemies who have large shields that they block with; the shields are a bit too big and they have a ton of health on hard, so even when you knock them down it can take multiple attempts to finish them off. There are devilish slasher enemies who fight with sword or throwing blade, but both of these varieties have issues with uptime and sort of leaving combat for absurd periods of time. In both cases a little bit of redesign and I'd never run into issues, but literally standing around waiting for enemies to come back to the fight or be damaged again is not something a FPS should ever do.
The only normal enemy I'm not keen on is the flying bird men; I would take these out of the game, or at least remove the weird "and now, a flock of bird men!" fights. They sort of flap out and tickle you with fireballs, which feels more silly and monotonous than threatening. They're pretty cool when they show up mid-way through a normal fight, though, as they break up the sight lines, so I guess maybe just that entire encounter idea.
Inverse to the main swarms of enemies is the mini-boss design, which is where more of the Hard Reset problem comes in, which we'll also refer to as the "hard to stay interested". There are three mini-boss types, and all three of them have issues though only one of them is actively bad. The first type is a complete awesome looking warlord, who enrages his fellows. These guys are awesome to watch in action, and legitimately fun, though the designers need to refine them a little more. They have a "scorpion" get over here action, which would be really cool except the actual "danger" of the attack is the fact it roots you to the ground for quite a while before he pulls you in. This is really messy and leads to some dumb moments where an enemy you can't see or interact with will root you, ruining the rhythm, and then you sort of ... sit there. Most of the time they're really cool though, especially since they have very unique powers relating to their right or left, and they have enough health that can make a choice where to focus and change the flow of the fight. When you're fighting one of them, with other enemies, you will often try to cripple the left, but when you're fighting multiples you tend toward the right since most of their dps comes from there.
There are also these sort of undead sorcerer enemies, who have a whole list of abilities. These are pretty cool, but they're a bit frustrating and some of the spots they show up in don't work too well with them. Resurrection is an innately repetitive element, and you can end up in spots where it takes a long time to burn them down. You get these really dumb moments where they make an enemy in front of you as you fire a rocket, or where you're about to kill them and they put up an invulnerability shield, which is a bit iffy. The shield functions until you've killed five "special" skeletons. The invulnerability shield is ... Not well designed, simply put. Enemies have a ton of health, and if you lose track of their skeletons, the shield just stays up forever and ever. You really want to burn these guys down, then you can't.
The last mini-boss is a large armored brawler and simply a complete embarrassment in design. It is sort of the archetypical "bull" enemy, that charges into walls then gets stunned. You can't damage them from anywhere but their rear and even then it's a bit dicey. There's a whole convergence of garbage when it comes to these enemies. For one, they can turn on a dime, and getting them to actually move as their weight implies they should takes forever. For two, they can't be damaged from the front and it can take a long time to actually get them to move. They just sit there, strolling around, well into the point of agonizing tedium. Lastly, you are meant to rocket attack them, but they're right beside you, so you have to run away, fire the rocket and then they instantly turn on you. It's just so goddamn painfully boring and frustrating, offering an instant nadir in every chapter they show up in. I didn't start dying to them until the very late game, where the painful boredom swelling up in my throat was making me wonder why I was even playing the game anymore. These things flash me back to how awful Hard Reset got in its latter half and reminded me why I quit on that game.I mean, I quit playing Hard Reset before bothering to finish it, because the game just becomes increasingly "this is tedious". Challenge is immaterial, Shadow Warrior has some great hard fights, but this nonsense with waiting around to be allowed to damage an enemy goes completely against what makes the game fun. Seriously, you just stare at them and they do this whole song and dance, roaring and thrashing around, and just god who came up with this? It's so boring. I don't play FPS games so I can sit there waiting to attack, I play FPS games so I can constantly be shooting things!
The other real sad point is unless I'm missing something, they're the only enemy in the game that doesn't have limb related effects. Even the bosses do, sort of, so they're just a real black hole of suck. The worst part is when you encounter them with other enemies. You're not trying to juggle how dangerous they are, but rather how tediously you have to position yourself because yes, they can turn on a dime, so if you're caught out in the open they just slam into you repeatedly. The limb thing is so cool in execution, that any enemy without an interaction with it is just missing a big chunk of the game.
On the other hand, the biggest problem with the enemies is they, much like these minibosses above, simply become kinda tedious as you approach the end of the game. There simply aren't enough kinds of enemies, especially minibosses, for the number of times they repeat over and over. This is compounded with the issue of the late game "shrinking box", which I'll go into more in a bit. When you add in the way that they protect themselves with shields or other nonsense, you get tired of fighting them. It just stops being fun or exciting, and become monotonous. This was a problem in Hard Reset and a problem here, albeit for different and somewhat more interactive reasons.
As for the bosses - They're huge, epic, and on the most part unfortunately designed. I'm not really certain what happened in design or how they messed these up, but on the most part they take a long time and are just really boring. Even on hard, they all work around this mechanic of hitting a weak point over and over before exposing that weak point. Then you're allowed a short period to actually damage the boss. The game is neither good at giving you feedback on whether or not you are actually damaging the weak point to expose it, and then which angle you fire toward to hit that weak point.
I mean the bosses look really cool, and I really like the story reason for their design, but it's just boring and irritating much of the way. Once you get into the groove of damaging them, healing and picking up ammo, it's just a long endless string of monotony. But this goes back to a big flaw in this game: Enemies are too defensive. They block, they have shields, invulnerability, root, teleports and just an endless parade of abilities which rotate around one critical thing: You, not damaging, them. Which is: Boring. You want enemies to take more time to dps? Put more enemies on the battlefield!
Oh, also, why the hell do the bosses spawn flame thrower or revolver ammo?
Level design in Hard Reset was, and I'm probably a bit more critical after a year since playing it, absolutely mediocre if not outright terrible. Poorly set up arenas that don't look good, aren't clever and just awkward coupled with poorly set up maps that do look good, but lack conveyance and often lead to awkward moments of going "where do I go next" which isn't excusable when the level designer is rarely, if ever, actually populating the levels with actual battle areas. Not that every level was like that, and it's a little better in Shadow Warrior depending on what chapter you're in - some of them have it a lot, others not at all - , but seriously there's no excuse for the connective tissue between battle arenas to be so clunky.
So Level design here is ... Better, and actually visually well put together, but it still has these awful moments where you're supposed to backtrack to something you can sort of see 'over there' and then just wonder what the hell the level designer is trying to convey. The level design is still not really good, and often way too repetitive or close in, but it is improved. I think they might have multiple level designers, or different aims for the levels, which means some of them really are phenomenal and some of them are just kinda shrug.
Still, then again, the game sort of reminds me of Dead Space, for more than just this reason, in that the levels do feel like someone sat down and tried to at least sort of make them look a little realistic. They're built around being a dock, a science lab, a section of downtown in a small town, a cemetery, stuff like that. As with Dead Space, some of the frustrations simply stem from how people lay those things out, or how real world thinking about how to move through an area doesn't quite convert. Also much like Dead Space there's way, way too much blood and gore just goofily scattered around the levels, which doesn't impress me. This thankfully isn't anywhere near the Dead Space levels, but it's still a little overdone.One thing I wanna note is the environmental hazards thing is just so painfully overplayed in this game, and it's almost weird how little they do to enemies. The whole room explodes, and nothing dies, you lose half your life and the screen is extremely cluttered. As with Hard Reset, there is a disconnect in design between the visuals on the screen and their severity within the scope of gameplay. You get into these moments where you're dodging and weaving through melee or near melee enemies, taking a hit here or there, and then one of them blunders into a garbage can that apparently explodes. Bam! Now you're at sub-40% health and none of the enemies around you seem to notice. Then you die, and you're not exactly impressed with how. Thankfully the game doesn't have the awful jam on your screen nonsense Hard Reset had - at least not to the same point.
Monster health is, unshocking given its roots in Hard Reset, way too high in Shadow Warrior relative to their density and movement speed. You end up with a lot of 'backed into a corner' moments, which is about as far from old school shooter as you can possibly get. I don't think the designers actually sat down and did math on how long it takes to kill enemies if you're not perfectly lining up shots versus how quickly they go into melee. I also really, really do not understand the game designer's dumb attitude toward putting money everywhere in tiny piles. It's just moronic to put like, forty dollars in a room spread over five piles. I constantly think to myself "hello can I find some ammo" and then searching the room results in ten bullets and then $27 spread out in a couple piles.
That is just awful. The money system in general is weird. You have three xp bars, so to speak, with different granularity for each of them. I like the weapon upgrade concept, but the system as simply adds tedium. You slowly collect up coins and bills which allow you to, at any time, simply open a menu and upgrade or in very rare circumstances purchase ammo. Ammo is so expensive as to be prohibitive to buy, though, and the upgrades being handed out whenever feels jarring.
Also, just as an aside, at the start of the game I noticed it seals you into arenas for no reason during some, most, generally a lot of the fights. I admittedly thought to myself "Why would they do this?" and then also immediately realized, of course as with any 3d geometry thing, it was going to bug out. And what do you know! It does. There is nothing more insulting than the level designer trapping you behind auto-locked doors that only open when fights end and then putting enemies somewhere you can't get to them. Like, this could never back fire. This could not possibly be a terrible idea, could it?
Ugh. Which isn't to say the game should never do this, only that the game overplays the mechanic. Having a big forced arena for a battle against two mini-bosses works, its dramatic, it gives you this "Shit is on!" feeling. Having a forced arena in a tiny closet with like, eight enemies total makes you wonder if the level designer has OCD. It's also kinda detrimental given the limitations of the game; forcing you into increasingly smaller and smaller boxes as the game goes on creating increasingly repetitive fights. There are fights that break out of the mold, but by chapter 16 or whatever you get accustomed to just how tiny the boxes are considering what you're fighting. It just keeps happening, too, over and over.
Weapon design in Shadow Warrior is a bit more of a mixed bag than I'd like, but it is as I'd expect. Which is to say it isn't very good. Hard Reset had issues with its guns and having too many guns. It's funny, you know, like if you look at the original Doom all of the weapons felt good other than the pistol ... Which was the pistol. And the pistol shared ammo, so basically, you never used it. In this game you get an automatic pretty early on, and you basically just wish most of the other ammo that drops was just auto ammo. Both the shotgun and the crossbow are hard to use effectively and barely feel rewarding. I also don't understand the point of the flamethrower when I have a wicked glowing magical sword to sword people with. Which isn't to say you'll never use the flamethrower, shotgun or the crossbow, as they have their applications, but for how finicky they are it can be a little strange in their effective dps.
The worst element is the demon heart. Take this one back guys. I'm not even entirely sure how demon hearts work, you can only carry one, they trigger when you're near ... Some number of minor demons? Or something? If there's one thing I don't want in an FPS game, its kludgey junk that is off on number 8.
Second worst is the shotgun. Cripes. The shotgun does ... nothing. You can take the upgrade that allows it to fire all four barrels at once and it doesn't kill most enemies. I don't understand how can make the shotgun so bad. It's basically "a bad sword". The sword actually has a pair of attacks that operate a ton like a shotgun that doesn't suck, so you just use that.
The sword though, well, there's some ups and some downs. The basic sword attack is often rendered generally worthless and I have legitimately no idea what the devs were thinking there. Maybe its because I'm playing on hard, but enemies block everything, and enemies turn way too fast to slice at their hind-quarters. People "get" that the reason melee sucks in a lot of video games is enemies turning instantly and still firing their weapons at point blank while you're hitting them with a katana, right? Because seriously, try to fire a gun at someone with a sword in your face. Adding to that the "charged" sword attack is stupid, and an overcomplication. Here's an idea - make the basic sword attack useful and save the extra keystrokes for elsewhere.
The sword skills though, are pretty cool, if sort of wobbley. You get "Divider of Heavens" early on. It sounds bad ass. It is bad ass. Unfortunately the keystroke combo for it is "W W attack" which means you have to stop moving forward, double tap and then my keyboard is often not pleased. My keyboard is a bit worn down, but this keystroke is awful. Even worse is the stun skill, which is W W RMB. Guess what often pops up? That's right, a stupid charged sword attack that shouldn't even be in the game.
Seriously, I really want to know what the point of it is. If you have time to charge your sword, you use divider. You get divider nearly at the beginning of the game, and you're forced to get it. The only time basic sword is useful is when you've stunned an enemy. I've also found that enemies seem to block circle of iron, which is an aoe whirlwind that looks really cool to do, but all but the very lowest level of enemies don't seem to take much from it. Since it immobilizes you, it doesn't really work as well as I'd like.
Shadow Warrior is still really cool for having a sword you want to use, though I feel like between enemies blocking and being so quickly into melee it is both a little forced and a little overcomplicated when everything else is going on. It often ends up feel more like how the shotgun should have, I think, with you darting in and out of melee, using divider and stun, but it is still satisfying gameplay. The way the dash skill works - draining stamina, but initially giving you this burst of speed - feels exactly right. I almost feel like the ability to run following a dash was unnecessary.
The various powers, skills, whatever you want to call them - there's several categories plus weapon upgrades - add a lot of expanding out as you go through the game. It is, much like the weapon design, something of a mixed bag. There are probably just too many powers and too many skills, and the key presses for them can get a little overwhelming. When, mind you, they work at all which I had increasing problems with getting the game to do as the game progressed. (I also noticed that the key presses worked less and less well the longer I ran the game, and restarting often smoothed them out, so I really don't know what is going on) I think the game would have benefited from a few less skills, a few less guns and a little more focus on making them all more clearly specific. There's this huge range of skills, weapons, altfire, upgrades ... It's just a little too much. Sometimes you do a fight and realize it would have been much easier to just use X or use Y, which is cool for replay, but it's a bit frustrating to try to mentally catalogue and sort through 25 different options for each fight.
Some people might see that as a huge advantage in design, though. So maybe it's for them. If nothing else, the fact you can't rebind the skills to other button presses is really annoying. There's also a lot of weird mismatches in the control scheme. If you mis-press the heal ( R R rmd) and fire off the altfire for the crossbow, you end up with an explosive on the ground that blocks normal fire mode. This made using the crossbow during tense fights, where the keypresses were most finicky, basically useless.
I actually found in the latter half of the game I no longer upgraded weapons to have the alt-firing mode, as the extra complication and punishment for misclicking ruined several of the weapons I had that did have alt-fire enabled. The fact you can't rebind, and instead waste keystrokes on useless garbage like shurikens or a flash light of all things, is galling and does show a lack of polish. Actually, if I could rebind just casting from rmd to my third mouse button, that might have worked, but it's not in the rebind menu.
I also sort of wish the game just didn't have the money or karma systems in the way it does. It just felt sort of like playing an ARPG, with spending those little bits of gold and getting skills on "level ups". The idea of giving you bonuses for how well you fought seems good, but after a while the system just loses its punch. I kinda feel like the karma bonus
All in all Shadow warrior is a "good" game and a lot better than Hard Reset. Sometimes you get into fights and they feel amazingly fantastic, with this like cinematic visceral feeling and then you're liking the game a lot. There's little more satisfying than realizing you can cripple a Warlord's arm and deny him access to one of his attacks, it's just an amazing convergence of mechanics. Then on the next fight, you can't shoot an enemy, or the level designer decided you really want to shoot a bunch of the hideously boring flying enemies. There is a reason cliff racers are still meme, and a big part of it is how bad flying enemies are. Especially when you have a sweet sword.
In a lot of ways I feel like it could have honestly been the best shooter I'd ever played if it worked on some of the goofy flaws. When you're in the groove, the engine is great and I love how fast Lo Wang moves, without going into the vomitron that is Wrack. The dash is really wonderful and the fact you can use a power while shooting, but then have to stop to reload, gives it this great feeling of tempo. Dash, heal, shoot, switch to sword, stun, slash, back off to shoot and heal - it's a really amazing rhythm.
The biggest issue, at least that I can nail down as not my keyboard's fault, is a mix between clunkiness in level design in the mid-game and then that same clunkiness continues as encounters become rather tepid in enjoyment, especially fights involving Berserkers and multiple enemies. It is very unenjoyable to manage killing multiple berserkers alongside killing certain other enemies - the sword spirit women have a habit of teleporting in front of you as you're firing a rocket, which is hard to mitigate and feels absolutely stupid when it happens. Some, boxed in levels and sorting enemies who are all too defensive drags out fights. The other thing is that while I really liked the levels in motion, they often didn't sort very well or boxed off in weirdly unenjoyable ways. Some of the "battle arenas" just felt unnecessary, it would be nice if the game divided between running fights between small groups of enemies and then those big epic battles.
On the other hand, I really want to point out that while the game is probably a wee bit racist, given what it came from and what it is referencing I was really satisfied with what it did with the material. Shadow Warrior is absolutely 100% how remakes should be done. Move past the bad ideas, double down on the good ideas and use something that tickles nostalgia without being crippled by it. I think this is one spot where there wasn't any malicious intent, and the designers were really trying to do something cool with something that had been wretched. I really liked Lo Wang, he was a bit crazy but his dialogue, especially with his side-kick was rather endearing. The story is not overly complicated, but it is complicated enough that you enjoy learning about the world. There are at least different factions and motivations, and Lo Wang doesn't blunder through like a total idiot.
I don't know what this team is doing next - I mean they just released a donkey kong country clone or something, so not that - but I really hope they finally cast off the shackles of Hard Reset's bad design elements and make the amazing game you could see in Shadow Warrior but wasn't quite realized. Much like Hard Reset, though much more slowly, I was disappointed with Shadow Warrior. Enemies are too bullet spongey and too defensive, and the game's internal pacing breaks down as you approach the end. It is still a huge improvement over Hard Reset, but the same pitfalls and poor design choices are present, which steps down the appeal of the game.
It's almost worse for how close it is to being really great, but instead it ended up just sort of good mostly, awful in parts and really incredible at a couple points as well. So good. Shadow Warrior 2013 is good. It should have been great, though. I had this feeling where I'm going through it waiting for the shittiness of Hard Reset to pop out, and while it took a long time, by the end of the game it all came back to me. The funny thing is that on the most part, most of what takes the game down a notch isn't what the game is missing. It's that the game has too much. Too many junky skills, too many enemy powers that are tedious to deal with, too many guns that don't work properly. Sometimes, less is more.
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