Shadow Warrior 2: Full Game Review For PC

I don’t know what it is with Polish developers and FPS games, I mean “People Can Fly” worked on the painkiller series, “Techland” worked on Call of Juarez and “ Dead Island” and “Flying Wild Hog” worked on hard reset and case in point, the Shadow Warrior reboot with Shadow Warrior 2.

It was two years ago when Flying Wild Hog took a stab at rebooting one of the greatest FPS games of all time with mixed results and in 2016, they started with the sequel and according to the internet, it's a huge success. If you had issues with the last game then this one is hardly going to win you over. It also makes some very bold changes which really differentiate it quite a bit from the first game.

THE STORY

The story again centers on Lu Wang, a wise talking ass-kicking Yakuza enforcer who finds himself in deep shit when he attempts to rescue Kimiko the daughter of a powerful Yakuza boss from his arch-nemesis Zillah. Only to have her soul suddenly transported into his head where she babbles on constantly like a spoiled little brat. From there, Lu Wang forms a tenuous alliance with the Yakuza and a bunch of demons carrying out missions for all of them as he attempts to free Kimiko and reunite her with her mutated body.

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Cinematics are frequent and delivered through Lu Wang's eyes where you'll do little more than just stand in one place for five minutes as people talk. I got to say that the humor in this game is just kind of stupid, it just seems that every single line of dialogue uttered by Lu Wang is trying to be funny whether it's making some kind of sarcastic remark when someone is telling him crucial plot information or one of his bizarre non sequiturs that just misses the mark entirely.

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It’s almost constant throughout the entire game and even during some of the more serious cinematics characters just make these out of place jokes. I know the original Lu Wang was a huge smartass but it kind of worked in that context because he wasn't talking all the time. You'd blow someone up with a grenade launcher and he just chuck in a quick one liner but when the character is talking constantly to have every second sentence contain some kind of dick joke or sarcastic quip, it just becomes unfunny very quickly.

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Anyway, this narrative style also affects the structure of the campaign as well compared to the first game which was a lot more linear this time around you've got a map screen which highlights where you'll be going for both the story and side missions. All of the missions send you to one of three or four different open world style areas with enemy and item placements randomized each time you return, encouraging exploration to collect more loot. Though, all of the best guns and items come from the mission rewards not from being found in two levels.

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More importantly, though completing these side missions earns extra skill points to unlock and upgrade all of low-paying skills, most of which are pretty run-of-the-mill like more health points, faster movement speed or more Chi. Chi being the matter of the game used to cast low Wang's various abilities and you're really going to want to upgrade low wing skills because this is a pretty damn challenging game at times especially if you're playing the game on the higher difficulties which you bloody well should be.

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And yet again it disappoints me to say that flying wild hogs seem to think that the only way to make a game difficult is to throw lots of enemies at the player at once. It's something they did quite obnoxiously in hard reset it's something they did it get in Shadow Warrior and now they've done the same thing again with Shadow Warrior 2. You'll be frequently taken on droves and droves of enemies though unlike its predecessor you've actually got the ability to simply avoid them entirely and just run right past them most of the time anyway.

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Like the first game, the combat often falls apart in a lot of ways due to some horrible balancing issues and just some plain unfairness in certain scenarios. We're quite often just getting bombarded from every single goddamn direction and it becomes impossible to not take damage. They've even included suicide bomber type enemies because who doesn't like an enemy that runs right up to you and blows the hell up. The gameplay is really reminiscent of Borderlands to me where you're leveling up and going around looting chests constantly for cash in items.

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But also in the way they've given all the enemies health bars with some of them having vulnerabilities or immunities to elemental damages like fire acid and electricity using them any upgrade components you come across drop by fallen enemies you can give certain weapons certain parameters to fit in with each element giving you an edge during combat. This is however more confusing that it is coherent because you might be fighting an enemy that's weak to fire and immune to acid but also be fighting the same enemy type who happens to be weak to acid but immune to fire and it just becomes this sort of clusterfuck of confusion as you're swapping back and forth between elemental SPECT weapons.

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It honestly becomes easier just to choose a weapon with a high DPS and forget about trying to match elemental types to enemies. Like the first game, there's a real focus on melee combat overusing ranged weapons and thankfully this time there's a whole heap of different melee weapons you can get your hands on not to mention a bunch of guns as well all of which look awesome. Guns are just kind of take a backseat is their largely much less effective on the whole even when you put a fair few upgrades into them. You think something like a minigun or a rocket launcher would really do some damage but they all just feel a little bit underpowered, the only time you really have to use them is during Boss fights.

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With the swords, you've either got the basic slash attack which does bugger-all damage and is often quite useless because most enemies can parry it. There's a charged up 360 type attack returning from the first gamewhere low Wang spins around hitting everything in his vicinity and attack which is utterly suicidal at high difficulties as you're vulnerable when you activate it. The only real useful attack I found is the stab where you thrust forward doing massive damage to whatever you hit which when fully upgraded can kill most standard enemies in a single hit. Chopping things up with the sword though is a whole heap of fun and the chunky sound effects when you cut something in half as blood spurts all over the place is gory and great to behold.

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Lu Wang's abilities don't really help all that much either you've got a couple of offensive spells and a couple of defensive ones as well where you can heal yourself over time and vanish for a few seconds if things get too heated. The most effective ability though is Shadow Warrior which is kind of like a rage mode where the screen goes all red for a bit you can cause massive damage in this time. The enemies in this game are total bullet sponges or sword sponges if you will.

Often, it can take minutes to kill every enemy in the area not because it's difficult but because their health points are so goddamn high and there's so many of them to deal with it once you're just constantly dashing around the place whittling their health down in between taking massive damage from the shoddy hit detection. Because the open well design it's common to accidentally aggro another bunch of enemies as you're trying to backpedal away from the current dozen attacking you causing the fight to go on even longer. This might sound fun but sometimes it just becomes really frustrating. The Boss battles are a battle of attrition with how long you can match that shift button to avoid getting pummeled.

GRAPHICS

Visually, I'm not sure I'd say this game looks any better than the first game I mean if anything it's about on par which isn't really an insult because the first game looked pretty much amazing. Performance wise, it seems to run pretty well though I am running it with 16 gigabytes of RAM a gtx 1080 and an i7 6700 K so most games are bound to run pretty well on that kind of hardware.

The environments and weapons look great but the character models look really sloppy like something from 7 or 8 years ago and there's lots of clipping issues where hands and hair go through clothing and other objects they shouldn't go through. As a side feature, it's also entirely possible to play the game in co-op mode as well which is a nice addition though I'm surprised there's no way to communicate with other players in game and the screen for inviting a friend isn't alphabetically organized so have fun scrolling through the couple hundred friends on your stainless trying to find that one person you want to play with.

MINIMUM SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

OS: Windows 7/8/8.1/10 x64
Processor: Intel Core i3-6300 (2 * 3800) or AMD A10-5800K APU (4 * 3800) or equivalent
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: GeForce GT 560Ti (1024 MB) or Radeon HD 6850 (1024 MB) or better
Network: Broadband Internet connection
Storage: 14 GB available space

RECOMMENDED SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

OS: Windows 7/8/8.1/10 x64
Processor: Intel Core i5-5675C (4 * 3100) or AMD A10-7850K APU (4 * 3700) or equivalent
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: GeForce GTX NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 / ATI Radeon R9 290 with 4 GB of Video Memory (4096 MB) or Radeon HD 7970 (3072 MB)
Network: Broadband Internet connection
Storage: 14 GB available space

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REVIEW/RATING

Graphics 8/10
Sound 8/10
Gameplay 7/10
Controls 8/10
Effect 8/10

OVERALL REVIEW/RATING

7.8\10

DEVELOPER

Flying Wild Hog

PUBLISHER

Devolver Digital

GENRE

Action, Adventure

MODE(S)

Single-player‎, Multi-player

RELEASE DATE

13 Oct, 2016

CONCLUSION

Rounding the whole thing up, I want to make it clear that I don't dislike Shadow Warrior 2 but the whole thing is just so mad. The humor in the game often falls flat on its ass, the combat gets the job done but the reliance of melee weaponry often limits the experimentation and overall fun you get to have. And visually like I said, it looks about the same as the previous game.

Overall, the whole thing is OK, I mean it's about the most ok game I've played in recent memory. However it's half the price of a standard FPS game with a campaign that's twice as long so the price is right that's definitely playable in the very least it's just the whole thing feels so uninspired. In terms of a first person shooter, Shadow Warrior 2 is definitely up there with the better ones it's just lacking something that needed to propel it into greatness.