By the end of the game, every combat encounter is a bloated slog of bullet sponge enemies that drags on for ten minutes or more. Shadow Warrior 3 doesn't have any better ideas for ramping up difficulty beyond throwing out ever higher numbers of its beefy demons, and the addition of two clunky boss fights doesn’t help. Each fight started testing my patience, even with the variety provided by platforming sequences that break up the march of combat arenas. The single finisher animation for each enemy type means the gruesome novelty is short-lived it’s not long before pushing the execution button feels like slamming the brakes. Character and weapon upgrades eventually make HP and ammo drops a reliable constant, flattening the rhythm of in-combat decision-making. It’s a fun balance to find, while it lasts.Īs the hours progress, the momentum crumbles.
Of course, that meant there were more bodies around to trip up my combat acrobatics. It produces some enjoyable tension between competing impulses-while carving through waves of yokai, I’d spare a handful of low-tier demons to harvest for ammo or finisher bonuses as necessary. Shadow Warrior 3's idea of Japan is an unbroken sea of pagodas and Buddha statues. Larger, tougher enemies will instead provide a “gore tool”: a temporary, high-damage weapon refashioned from a gruesome piece of the yokai’s corpse, like a hammer made from an oni’s meaty lower spine section. Those finishers provide an extra strategic layer: the most basic enemies will grant quick bonuses like temporary increases to maximum health, or a freeze grenade in the form of an icy slab of yokai brain matter. Players who still appreciate the older style of sprites in 3D action and who can look past the bad Asian jokes will probably thank their lucky throwing-stars for the arrival of Shadow Warrior.The shotgun’s carnage can, admittedly, be hard to parse. The game's sprite-based art is well executed, but seems out of date in the contemporary milieu of polygonal Quake-killers. In the end however, Shadow Warrior's only merits are its gameplay. Each deathmatch level contains something a little different. In another, players are sped along a track and must fire at each other with split-second accuracy. In one of these, the players vie to control a tank in the middle of an arena-like environment. In addition to the single-player levels, Shadow Warrior includes four levels designed specifically for deathmatch. Along with the strong language that the game unabashedly employs, the violence witnessed on your monitor will definitely qualify Shadow Warrior for an R rating. There you will have to dispense with killer apes, grenade-lobbing henchmen, TNT-toting suicide soldiers, and the ghosts that arise from their fresh corpses. The levels are creative, leading you through abandoned warehouses, to a submarine repository, and to a haunted forest village. Like Duke Nukem 3D, most of Shadow Warrior's levels are fairly expansive, containing plenty of typical find-the-key puzzles that must be solved in order to advance. Overall, while the game's arsenal seems to mimic that of Duke Nukem 3D in most respects, the weapons are still inventive enough to keep things interesting. There's even an enemy whose head can be retrieved and used as a flamethrower. Starting with a katana, a close-range sword that deals death in a single blow, Wang moves on to grab more lethal arms when it's really time to clean house - such as a pair of Uzis, or a grenade-launcher. Wang picks up a variety of devastating weapons to take care of unwanted company. Throughout the 22 single-player levels in the game, Mr. Behind this embarrassing display of ignorance on the part of Wang's creators, however, there lurks a late entry into the realm of sprite-based action games that's pretty fun despite its dated qualities. In the game, you play Lo Wang (pronounced "wong" in the real world and "wang" in the world of Shadow Warrior), an Asian assassin whose exact cultural background is obscured in a morass of toilet humor, exaggerated broken English, and bad Asian jokes. Shadow Warrior is 3D Realms' latest (and reportedly last) first-person shooter to utilize the patented Build engine that made Duke Nukem a household name.
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