Shadow Warrior’s 2013 reboot was one of the best reboots I have played. It did a good job of keeping what worked and adding in new elements. Shadow Warrior 2 was a real test because there never was a sequel to reboot so it would have to be a story and game play that were fresh and not in an any way copied from an old sequel. In this regards Shadow Warrior 2 was good to great. The story was well done for the majority of it. There were enough throwbacks to the reboot in terms of characters and references while still adding new ones and new plot points. The ending foes feel a bit rushed in the last couple story missions and the game does not really tie things up very tightly. If it’s goal was to setup the third game I don’t think it did that very well either. The sequel is more of a Borderland format of side missions and weapon upgrades compared to the reboot’s more linear story with light upgrade options. This works in many ways as there are a fantastic selection of weapons, amulets to equip to them, powers to learn, and passive improvements you can buy. The side missions are your standard quests for the most part but are still enjoyable. I did find the various levels could have been broken up more. When you get several straight side quests to the same area it makes it a bit dull and repetitive. That being said sometimes you get a bunch of possible side quests at once so you can choose to do them in a different order. The combat got a lot more vertical and it worked well. You can climb many surfaces as well as combine that with a dash function to make for some interesting ways to traverse levels and attack enemies. One thing the sequel did worse was that it did away with the option for manual saving and only has checkpoint saves. To make it worse enemies respawn when you exit the game and go back in even if the area was clear when you hit the checkpoint. This wasn’t a major issue, just a minor nuisance. The music and voice acting were both well done. The graphics were very good but not stunning. In fact I was a bit surprised at how much resources were used at times. It was still better than many other games out there for both optimization and quality though.
I played Shadow Warrior 2 on Linux using Wine and DXVK. There is an option for resolution, an FOV slider that goes from 50-100, a resolution scale slider that goes from 20-200%, four AF settings, toggles for v-sync; temporal AA; SSAO, and fifteen other graphics options. That is a crazy amount of options that gives the gamer a ton of control over their performance and experience. There are different difficulty options but you can’t change them mid game, you need to exit to the main menu as you change the difficulty when loading the game. Not the biggest deal but it would have been nicer to allow changing it whenever you want to. You can skip cut scenes. The game did have a few issues. It froze once, had one spelling error on a diary, and in one cut scene a characters foot went through a throne. Nothing too bad but they still happened. The performance was usually really good although I saw some brief slowdowns sometimes during checkpoints being tripped and also when I had a screen chalk full of enemies. The frame rate drops never lasted more than a couple seconds.
Game Engine: Road Hog Engine
Graphics API: DXVK
Disk Space Used: 14.3 GB
Input Used: Keyboard and mouse
Game Version Played: 1.1.14.0
Graphics Settings Used: 2560P, 125% resolution scale, v-sync on, 16x AF, v-sync; TAA; and SSAO on, depth of field and motion blur off, 68 FOV and all other settings at highest
GPU Usage: 57-100 %
VRAM Usage: 3147-5604 MB
CPU Usage: 12-49 %
System RAM Usage: 3.8-7.3 GB
Frame Rate: 19-165 FPS
Overall if you enjoyed the Shadow Warrior reboot, if you enjoy open world action games, if you enjoy fun and funny games then I think Shadow Warrior 2 will have something for you. It does a lot well and it’s misses and problems are few and minor. I finished the campaign on normal difficulty in nineteen hours. The current price tag of $33.99 CAD is a good sweet spot for the quality and length.
My System:
Intel i5-12600K | 32GB DDR4-3200 CL16 | Gigabyte RX 7800 XT 16GB | Western Digital Black SN850X 2TB | Solus | Dasharo 1.1.4 | Mate 1.28.2 | Kernel 6.12.19-315.current | Mesa 25.0.1 | MSI G2730QPF 2560*1440 @ 165Hz | Wine 10.1 | Heroic Games Launcher 2.15.2