After a while, one rush of monsters feels like another. However, it’s just not the kind of game you can play for hour after hour without finding it all just a teensy bit repetitive and exhausting. He’s not kidding, but then stupid rarely feels so right. At one point Wang warns his spectral hitchhiker to prepare for a “tsunami of stupid”. Even several hours in, the action can be exhilarating and breathless, as you tackle vast hordes of goons and monsters, surviving just by the skin of your teeth. While you might wish for a few more movement options beyond Wang’s double-jumps and forward rushes, he’s a nimble and responsive ninja warrior and the combat just feels right. The music’s cool in a retro, ’90s-game-soundtrack kind of way, and Wang’s quips are occasionally funny, though a little wearing after a couple of hours. Despite excessive use of haze effects, Flying Wild Hog’s engine pulls off consistently impressive visuals that compare pretty well to what you’d get from a triple-A game. Different foes demand different weapons and occasionally different strategies, though you can’t really accuse Shadow Warrior 2 of ever going too big on anything that requires a functioning brain. Variety is also the watchword with the enemies, with each level seeming to introduce some new form of demon, ogre, monstrous beast or vengeful creature, not to mention the spandex-clad ninjas, drones, mechs and weaponised sex dolls that populate the sci-fi areas. On top of this, Wang himself levels up, and you can spend skill points on upgrading his health, his powers of recovery and the whole gamut of melee, ranged and magical attacks. Beyond that, you can treat each and every one to a range of upgrades, giving them extra ammo or damage, faster reload times or a range of cool elemental effects. Because of the sheer, stupid number of weapons available, simply deciding which to give a place on your quick-selection wheel can be a challenge. There’s also more to it than you might expect. Kinetic doesn’t even begin to cover it Shadow Warrior 2 is one of the most blood-crazed, battle-mad, brawling-barmy games ever I’ve ever played. Hold and release your Alt-attack button to drive forwards through the enemy, splattering blood and gore, then use your magical powers to freeze your foes in place or knock them off their feet. Watch as limbs divide from torsos and heads spin off into the distance. Rush in, slash away, strafe left and right to dodge incoming blows. Now, Wang can wield a shotgun, grenade launcher or SMG with the best of them, but what always distinguished Shadow Warrior was its obsession with melee combat. Wang begins with his trusty katana and a magnum, then goes on collecting weapons at a furious rate, giving you a ridiculous arsenal of guns, blades, monster claws, chainsaws and handheld artillery after just a few hours into the game. Still, this isn’t a game of narrative but a game of action. A powerful magician extracts her soul from her body and places it in Wang’s, and the two join forces on a range of missions in the hope of stopping the corporation’s plans and restoring the girl to her normal state.Īt least, I think that’s it – after a few hours, I found the plot so utterly baffling and the missions so devoid of meaning that I’d lost all sense of what was actually going on. The plot kicks off when the daughter of a crime boss, undercover in a sinister corporation’s lab, becomes possessed. You play Lo Wang, a smart-mouthed ninja assassin in a world where pseudo-Oriental fantasy meets Chinese triad dramas meets Western sci-fi. It’s just a shame that the appeal begins to wane after the first few hours.įans of the 2013 reboot or the 1997 original will already be comfortable with the basics. With its ludicrously intense, ultra-violent combat, daft one-liners and insatiable appetite for gore, this game from developer Flying Wild Hog is a great reminder of everything that once made the shooter so much fun. This is, in many ways, a wonderful thing. It looks bang up to date, but the core gameplay feels rooted in the glory days of Duke Nukem, Quake 2, Half-Life, Serious Sam and No-One Lives Forever. Like its much-loved predecessor, Shadow Warrior 2 seems to take us to an alternative universe where Halo and Call of Duty never happened and the FPS developed along the lines of late-’90s PC shooters. Available on PC (version tested), PS4 and Xbox One
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