Shadow Warrior is a modern reboot of a 3D Realms 1997 classic of the same name by Polish developer Flying Wild Hog which was founded by former employees of People Can Fly, creators of Painkiller. Shadow Warrior is set in modern day Japan and tells a rather convoluted story about a demon invasion. The players assume the role of assassin Lo Wang who works for a powerful Japanese industrial magnate Orochi Zilla who is tasked with retrieving a legendary katana called Nobitsura Kage. Things start to go very wrong very soon and Wang will have to fight his way through hordes of hired assassins and demons.
The storytelling is mostly a miss because the game can’t decide whether it wants to be a parody or not. Lo Wang himself is a walking parody who will make fun of familiar gaming tropes, but on the other hand you have these prolonged and wholly uninteresting cutscenes about some demon family and their issues. It’s an awkward mish-mash that just doesn’t work and the writing is pretty weak in both cases. The serious story is just boring and while the jokes will make you chuckle here and there, they will also sometimes fall flat.
The real reason to play this game is its setting and gameplay, both of which make Shadow Warrior stand out from most modern action games. The graphics are colorful and vibrant, the wonderful game world makes both the combat and the exploration a joy. You start off with an ordinary katana and a pistol, but you will acquire more and more weapons as you go along and you get to keep them all, there’s no weapon limit here. All weapons can be upgraded not only to become more powerful, but also to gain an alternate firing mode which is usually just completely over the top. For example, you can upgrade your two-barrel shotgun to a four-barrel shotgun and the alternate firing mode will enable shooting all four barrels at the same time resulting in complete carnage.
While the shooting is great and wholly satisfying, the best part of the combat is slicing up your enemies with your trusted katana. You will have the opportunity to unlock a wide variety of different moves which will make the combat even more visceral and exhilarating. You’ll actually do pretty well just by button mashing, but if you want to get a better performance score and additional karma points, then you will have to use these special moves. They’re actually rewarding to use in and of themselves because they just make you feel like a total badass. And that is something that Shadow Warrior does extremely well.
Shadow Warrior provides a nice selection of different enemies ranging from hired assassins, low level demons to bigger and badder demons and huge bosses. The bosses actually don’t represent the highlight as they use the tried and true expose-and-hit-weakpoint type of design. They’re pretty good, but the best part is fighting droves of different enemies in big environments where you have melee enemies charging at you, ranged enemies throwing fireballs at you and flying enemies wreaking havoc from overhead. Managing these huge battles is just incredibly exciting and trying out all the different moves and weapons that are at your disposal is just unbelievably satisfying. The combat system is simply excellent.
I found the pacing to be awesome. The game doesn’t constantly drown you in enemies which I often tend to find exhausting. After you clear an area, you are free to explore it and there’s a reason to do so as the world is littered not only with necessities such as health and ammo, but also secrets and easter eggs. However, if you’re only in it for the combat, you can just head on forward and you will be fighting non-stop. The game world is not consistently delightful, about halfway through you will have to trudge through several brown and bleak sewers, shipyards and some sort of a science facility. However, the design and the combat remain strong throughout making this a relatively minor gripe. Shadow Warrior is also quite a lengthy game, unlike most modern action and FPS games, it took me 16 hours to finish it on the normal difficulty setting.
Flying Wild Hog simply understand action game design and Shadow Warrior is a truly great action game with a fantastic and visceral melee combat system, satisfying shooting mechanics and a wonderful game world.