So I just finished Shadow Warrior (2013) and I wasn’t blown away by it but I had a decent time. I always like hearing about experiences that people had with the game when it first came out and whether or not a modern perspective paints it differently.
To summarize what I thought: The writing is humorous, but not outright funny to me. The graphics hold up very well and the gore is great. Combat is mostly pretty good. Some enemies are annoying or overly difficult on the hard difficulty but overall it’s pretty good.
I did think it was modeled to be kind of akin to a Serious Sam type game and it lives up to that but similar to that game, many of the weapons/enemies/levels overstay their welcome a bit. Other than that I had a pretty good time with it, thought it was an 8/10 fun time.
What’s everyone’s story with this game series? When did you first play it and what did you think about it?
What I noticed is that my favorite FPS in this genre really do a nice crescendo towards the end that the 2013 reboot game lacks.
I mean they do great on enemy variety. They need some tweaking on damage but otherwise fine. Gun play is mostly good to excellent. But what’s lacking is that thing where the arenas get more and more intense. Enemies are combined in various types to make each encounter play much differently.
Like how in the newer doom games you typically have units that snipe at your from range, ones that are highly mobile, others that can tank damage. So in higher level combat you’re just swapping weapons constantly to counter each different mob while also coming up with unique strategies for each arena.
The arenas here are mostly plain. You have almost no verticality in any arena. Your movement is beyond basic and stilted. And then when you finally get some bigger battles you realize that none of the mobs really mesh together well at all.
To put it bluntly it’s like the difference between Batman Arkham series games where each enemy makes you dance to kill them versus Skyrim fighting 50 NPCs. They don’t play off of each other, they’re all just constantly fighting for your attention versus a complex and rewarding dance. A good FPS game is mostly measured by how differently you need to approach each encounter and here it’s almost all one note unfortunately.