Shadow Warrior

砍砍砍 射射射 就够了

6,7/10

This game looks and feels like a Hollywood movie made in the 80s. A *Chinese* *ninja* who speaks and acts like a *typical American*, collects comic books, smokes cigarettes, drives a sports car and has a katana in one hand and a yakuza one-handed SMG in the other? Sounds reasonable to me! Pros: + Graphics. The visuals are amazing. Yes, the graphics are old, but this is another example of how a cinematic look created by graphic and level designers who actually love their work and seasoned with (cinematic) lighting will always be better than ray-tracing with realistically refracted light. Honestly, I'd love to see this game being more immersive and offering more exploration apart from the hidden trophies. + Music. My first Shadow Warrior game was SW2, which I liked back in the day, as well as its soundtrack. However, after playing SW 2013, I like its OST, including the main theme, much, much more. That's the kind of music I'd expect to hear in an 80s movie called Shadow Warrior. + Gameplay. It's all about shredding demons into pieces, and it's... surprisingly fun. There're some issues, though, which I'll talk about below. + Characters and story. There aren't many characters, that is. Lo Wang and Hoji make a good team. The Kyokagami twins amuse to some extent, but for the most part they're annoying; the good thing is that Lo Wang treats them as they deserve by [spoiler]blowing them up along with the ship[/spoiler]. The story is an anime soap opera comic about ancient Japanese gods. I'd prefer it to be more down to earth, but I think Shadow Warrior was never about the story, so that's fine with me. Cons: - "Crashes." For me, the game itself crashed only once, but several times after completing a level, the game was stuck when doing calculations on the results screen. I believe that could be caused by newer hardware or by a newer version of Windows. Anyway, I recommend that you manually save your game after arenas when you feel like the chapter is about to end (for me, each chapter took approx. 1 hour). - Gameplay. Starting from Chapter 12-13, it feels like the devs put less effort into the remaining chapters since there're a lot of annoying dull corridors, offices and labs, encounters with enemies happen more often, and some of the arenas are poorly designed. - Firearms. Most of the guns have little to no impact and have poor accuracy, specifically the revolver, SMG, shotgun; the crossbow is decent though. Guns feel much better in the sequel. Personal preferences: +/- There're [spoiler]4[/spoiler] different bosses, [spoiler]5[/spoiler] bossfights, but only [spoiler]2[/spoiler] types of bossfights where you either [spoiler]slice your opponent with the katana[/spoiler] or [spoiler]shoot at the opponent's armour to strip his weak spots and deal maximum damage during a given time window[/spoiler]. Still, the bosses are fun and not challenging. Also, you have the option to save your game state during a boss fight. +/- The game isn't as difficult as it seems. I played on Insane and didn't really use any of the KI techniques (apart from healing, of course), just katana + LMB + dash and some guns for bigger enemies. However, for those who find just slashing enemies boring, those KI skills/powers should make it more interesting.