Shadow Warrior 2013

Bloody Awesomeness

Do you like kicking ass? Do you think that more FPS titles should allow you to use swords instead of guns? Do you like slicing and dicing your enemies into itty bitty bits with said swords?

My friend, have I got the game for you.

Putting the “ass” in mass murderer, Shadow Warrior stars Lo Wang, a Yakuza hitman with a definite sense of style and an ego rivaling Mount Olympus. To give you an idea of the sort of humor Mr. Wang employs, here’s a quote from the game:

“My name is Lo Wang and I go bang bang!”

And boy does he ever.

The humor here is an almost wince worthy level of immature, but I found myself chuckling at a few of his more memorable quips. Apparently, the original game is even worse in this department, so I’m kind of looking forward to trying it.

Oh that’s right, Shadow Warrior is a remake of a 1997 title, which I never had the pleasure of playing. It’s available for free on steam though, so I downloaded it and I’ll give it a look one of these days, just to see how it stacks up against the remake.

I will say that the new Shadow Warrior is an amazingly pretty game. Of course, it certainly helps if you can max out all the graphical settings, but there is a level of detail here that I’m just not used to seeing in games. You can watch individual candle flames flicker and thin wisps of smoke rise up from them. In the winter levels snow flurries blow in through the windows from outside. In the very first level there are cherry blossom trees and you can walk among swirls of falling pink blossoms.

I’m not usually one for gushing on about how games look, but man, the visual presentation in Shadow Warrior is oftentimes jaw dropping. Whenever you find yourself stopping and staring at stuff, not even looking around for enemies and fumbling for the screenshot key, you know a game has managed to do it right.

The game revolves around a katana called the Nobitsura Kage. Or rather, three katanas which can be combined into one, uber katana, capable of striking down the gods themselves...or something like that anyway. Mystic magical katana awesomeness. Much better than the boring old normal katana you start the game with. As you collect the three swords and wield them in combat, you gain different bonuses depending on which of them you have, finally culminating in an ability so broken I was able to just tank the final boss of the game on hard difficulty.

It was AWESOME.

But it’s a long road to get all of the swords. And there are...things in the way.

You start off with a simple mission. Attempt to convince an old man to sell his katana for the two million dollars your boss has given you in a briefcase. As you arrive at his place, you realize that there are an awful lot of guards hanging around with guns and swords. The old man has no interest in selling the Nobitsura Kage, but he appears to be totally willing to have his army of goons escort you off the premises, scuse me, sorry, chop you into little pieces with their swords.

Welcome to Shadow Warrior, where yakuza thugs in business suits insult you as they circle around you and try to stab you with katanas. They all seem to know your name too, which is weird because Lo Wang introduces himself as Mr. Two Million dollars. Minor plot holes aside, the first fight in the game is super fun. You dodge enemy sword strikes, slash back at them and hack off arms and heads and legs, all while Lo Wang whistles to himself about “choppin up dudes” and makes smartass comments, wondering how much being a lackey pays these days.

The game is terribly, ridiculously gory, by the way. But not in a “The Evil Within” survival horror sort of way. It’s more like that scene from Kill Bill where Uma Thurman chops up the Crazy 88. It’s so ridiculous and cheesy you can’t take it seriously, with truly stupid amounts of blood spraying all over the place. It even gets worse as the game goes on, stacking bodies like cordwood around strange altars or nailing dead people to the doors and walls, but these corpses are so ubiquitous they might as well be window dressing and they don’t look real anyway. They look like someone has stolen a bunch of human sized rag dolls and manikins and dipped them in bright red paint, after which they were liberally strewn about everywhere.

I’d say it’s kind of an atmosphere fail, but since the atmosphere is cheesy and violent, it fits right in, honestly.

So it’s not long after you slice a bunch of yakuza into sausage that all hell breaks loose and demons from the shadow realm invade everywhere, indiscriminately killing all who stand in their way.

With the exception of a certain egotistical, smartass hitman. Lo Wang is singularly unimpressed by the demons, proclaiming once that “I like my demons like I like my coffee, in puddles all over the floor.”

It’s here that the game really starts to pick up. You track down the old man, but a strange golem has taken the Nobitsura Kage and the old man is dead. He does however, have an immortal spirit named Hoji who makes an agreement with Lo Wang, saving him from the brink of death.

Hoji is even more sarcastic and smarmy than Lo Wang himself and the chatter between the two of them is pretty darn amusing most of the time. Hoji, being an immortal spirit, cannot touch anything in the physical world and needs Lo Wang to do his dirty work for him. He unlocks certain mystical abilities you can level up as you play. There are three in-game menus you can switch between. The first is your sword-type abilities, the second is your ki spells, and the third is your weapon upgrade system. You use money to upgrade your guns, karma to upgrade your sword skills and magic crystals to upgrade your spells.

You gain karma by utilizing different combinations of attacks against your enemies in an engagement, after which the game gives you a karma bonus based on a five star rating. Throwing stars, that is. You find money hidden in containers and cabinets all over the place and finally, there’s pretty much just one magic crystal per level. You won’t have enough crystals to fully upgrade all of your spells in a single playthrough, so choose wisely.

The sword moves are quite fun to use. The first one you get is a powerful forward thrust, which you’ll be using a lot. It pretty much dices weaker enemies to bits if you hit them directly, and is hugely fun to do in combination with the dash move. There’s also a move where you swing your sword in a deadly circle around yourself, slashing any enemies that are close by. It’s great for when you’re surrounded and you can circle slash either to the right or left, depending on which buttons you hit. The last sword move is a ranged ki strike, where you cut through enemies directly in front of you in a straight line. It’s great for groups of enemies coming right at you. All of the sword moves take a little bit to charge up though, so you have to really get down your dodging abilities and attack timing if you use your sword a lot.

And really, why wouldn’t you?

There are a few different kinds of spells. The first one you get is a healing spell which is very necessary. There’s also a shield spell, a spell that knocks down enemies that are close to you, and a spell that lifts enemies up into the air so you can attack them while they hang helplessly. You can level up the range, effectiveness, and duration of the spells as you get more crystals while you play.

There are only a few different upgrades per weapon, but they can drastically alter the performance and effectiveness of your guns. There’s usually a damage boost of some sort, as well as some way to increase ammo capacity. And you can purchase ammo from the upgrade menu as well, if you run low. The final upgrade per weapon is some kind of alternate fire, which is usually quite useful and I would recommend paying for it.

By far, karma is the easiest to acquire. Your karma points go up depending on how you play, so the more creative you are in combat, the more karma you get and the more sword ability upgrades you can afford. There are also demonic altars with pools of blood you can find in hidden areas, which give you a karma boost.

There are secret areas in every level and in my playthrough I only found a handful of them. You can comb the levels carefully for them if you like, but mostly the only things you’ll find are amusing throwbacks to the original game, with levels taken directly from it and usually a statue you can find that gives you a large money boost.

Oh and there are like, mostly naked chicks which are pixilated anime style sprites from the original game hidden in some of these areas, prompting Lo Wang to make the quip, “I wish you were in HD” one time.

Like I said, pretty juvenile humor here.

The old levels are graphically equivalent to Doom II and the ‘bathing beauties’ are fanservice from the original game as well, so it’s an amusing nod to that game and sort of a ‘welcome back’ to old fans.

In addition to all the fun you’ll have combining your sword abilities with spells, the gunplay is pretty good as well. Most demonic targets take a lot of punishment before going down however and certain ones have annoying shields you can break if you deal enough punishment to them.

There are a lot of reasons that I really really enjoyed playing Shadow Warrior and a few things that annoyed me. Lemme break em down for you here.

Things that I love about Shadow Warrior:

Swords.

Guns.

Spells.

Demon fighting.

Fantastic combat.

Terrible humor.

No regenerating health!

Little need for iron sights. Oh they’re there, but you don’t really have to use them.

Little need for cover. You are Lo Wang. Go kill things. No need to cower behind stuff when you have a portable shield spell.

A wonderful lack of ‘modern’ and ‘realistic’ FPS elements.

On that note, being able to carry more than TWO WEAPONS AT A TIME. By the way, I am firmly of the opinion that if ‘realism’ gets in the way of you having a good time in your game, dump it.

Feeling like a total badass as I chopped my way through the demonic armies of the shadow realm.

The preeetty pretty graphics.

Blowing up cars...and air conditioning units, and motorcycles and firework stands...and llights and arcade machines...and...and and...well, pretty much anything and everything that goes BOOM! I am an incorrigible walking disaster in this game.

The crossbow is my frieeend.

A chaingun that has unlimited ammo and NO overheating.

The tram ride.

Hoji.

Surprisingly, Lo Wang himself. Cheesy dialogue and all.

Dual wielding submachine guns.

A quad barreled shotgun!

Rocket launcher with Nuke Dukem rockets. Yes I said that correctly.

Unwarranted head shaving.

A surprisingly interesting plot involving a quarrel between immortals told in artsy still shot sequences that look like they were painted by hand.

The Nobitsura Kage.

Things I do NOT love about Shadow Warrior

The game is a few hours longer than it should be. Too much length padding.

The battle system got really repetitive towards the end of the game. Granted, it’s all old school, so you go from one place to the next and kill everything you find in a linear corridor/arena shoot. Just kind of got boring after a while.

Bullshit magical door seals. SO TIRED OF THESE. Just let me into the next area already!

Exploding cars in the street while I’m trying to swordfight demons. Who packed all of the vehicles in the world with C4? I do like destroying stuff, but not so much when I spin in place, slice all the demons to bits around me and accidentally nick the nearest SUV with my sword. BOOM goes the dynamite.

Stupidly tough summoning demons with random magic shielding I can’t break until I kill all their summons.

Overall incredibly high enemy health makes the game a tedious chore to get through at points. Instead of throwing more interesting enemies at me with varying attack patterns, the game just eventually started making everything super tanky and annoying to kill. Not really all that fun.

Shield demons. OH so many shield demons. I hates them I does.

Lo Wang and Hoji are kind of dicks, honestly. Heroes, they are not, even if I do like both of them.

Killing SWAT teams for no reason. As demons fill the streets slaughtering everyone, a few random, heavily armed patrols of humans hold certain positions. They open fire on you immediately, leading to their complete and total annihilation. There is no real reason for this other than to break up the gameplay a little. They don’t look like Yakuza or the main enemy’s goons. This irritated me. It really felt like I had no reason to be slaughtering them and I didn’t care for it. Though I suppose Lo Wang is a criminal, I still think he probably would have left them alone if they weren’t shooting at him.

Bamboo forest mazes. So annoying.

Humping rabbits. Like I said earlier, very low brow humor. Why are there rabbits having sex all over the place in my demon killing simulator? Sure you can use them for target practice, but still....

Long ass boss fights. Though the presentation is pretty cool, on the higher difficulties, slogging through these fights can take a really long time. You’ll rarely get hit, if ever, as the bosses are so ginormous you can usually see their attacks coming a mile away and dodge. They are all super tanky too, involving repeatedly shooting off bits of armor so you can hit the inside of the boss, right before the armor reappears and you have to do it all over again. Oh and they are too stupidly big for you to use your sword skills on, so it’s pretty much guns all the way. Hope you’ve upgraded them.

Super hidden secret areas. I like finding secrets and goodies, but I’m really kind of lazy about it. If they are just a little bit out of my way I’ll go looking for em, but if you hide them in incredibly difficult to find areas, I simply do not care. No amount of pixilated animeish fanservice, retro levels from the original game, or money statues will inspire me to scour your game levels with a fine tooth comb searching for them. I will look around, because I like exploring and your game world is pretty, but that’s it. Life is too short and I have too many games to play to go looking for every little hidden bit of whatever you have secreted around your game. I’m sure it’s all quite interesting and cleverly hidden, but if you make it stupidly hard to find I’m moving on.

So that’s about all I have to say about Shadow Warrior. Fun game. Probably best played in small doses or you’ll get pretty tired of it. They’re working on the sequel right now which has coop play through the main storyline, which is pretty damn cool. It looks like there’s more free roaming capabilities, with the player able to air dash from place to place and climb all over buildings that were basically corralling you in this game. I have no idea how they’re going to continue the story, given how this one ended, but I’m sure it’ll be big and full of stuff that goes boom.

I’m quite looking forward to it, actually.