There’s something intimate about sword combat in first-person. Your surroundings are obscured, placing added emphasis on the one-on-one stare-down with your foe. Patiently observe the subtlest of their movements to strike when the time is right.
If you have any experience with the Shadow Warrior series, you’ll know that’s not how these games work. The modern Shadow Warrior trilogy approaches the blend of classic and modern shooting in the same way as Doom and Doom Eternal. Shadow Warrior 3 is no different, revolving around fast-paced action, rapid shooting, and oh yeah, that slick katana that can cut down all the foes who stand in your way. Forget about waiting for the right time to strike – just swing away like you’re beating an alien at the end of Signs.
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Like any reimagining of a Build Engine classic, Shadow Warrior 3 has guns and gore aplenty. Strangely enough, it’s the bits that lack shooting that end up being the most interesting. Doom Eternal goes all the way by giving the Doomslayer an array of movement options. The dash is just the beginning, as you quickly start stringing it into wall jumps, climbs, swings, and more. Shadow Warrior 3 has taken several cues from what Eternal did best, with cheeky ninja protagonist Lo Wang regularly wall-running and jumping through broken environments instead of awkwardly sauntering from combat encounter to combat encounter.
It definitely helps the pace, and the grappling hook is a lovely addition – especially when it can be used in battle to swing around the arenas and blast foes as you fly by. Meanwhile, much of the platforming segments themselves are laced with Uncharted-style set-piece action, but on a smaller scale. Cinematic drive-bys with Lo Wang being dragged behind a truck? None of that here, but sliding through jungle ruins as Lo Wang blurts out genitalia jokes? Absolutely. It’s not as visually impressive as what other games have done in similar situations, but Shadow Warrior‘s varied movement mechanics keep things interesting as you jump, dash, and swing through environments, tapping buttons and shooting obstacles like a rhythm game. It’s incredibly satisfying.
Compared to all of the above, fighting demons starts to feel a bit old-hat over time. When you first encounter a new creature, it feels intense as you gauge their attacks to clinically take them down. When you have potentially dozens of that same creature littering the stage, however, it feels overwhelming – not necessarily challenging, but overwhelming. I rarely felt like any matchup was too difficult, but I regularly found myself wondering when the spawns would stop. Taking out one enemy at a time is inefficient, and you’ll quickly find yourself with more enemies to fight than you can possibly fit on the screen at once. If you thought your view was narrow when fighting with your katana before, you’re not going to like it when you’re surrounded on literally all sides.
With so many foes it can be difficult to track their position or even your own. Often battle arenas have spots where you can fall to your demise, but instead of a harsh death and restart, you’ll just pop back into the arena with a bit of health shaved off. Unfortunately, this feels like a concession for the fact it is so very easy to fling yourself into oblivion when dodging dozens of projectiles. You’ll be clicking the dash button enough to get sick of it. Some arenas mix things up a bit and give you alternate ways to defeat enemies by using the environment or special weapons, but it rarely reinvents the flow of gameplay.
What’s much more interesting are the Finisher kills. Once you’ve built up enough Finisher Points, you will be able to execute an instant-death kill on any non-boss monster, with tougher monsters requiring more Finisher Points. Each of these animations is unique per monster type, and they’re clearly modeled after Doom‘s melee finishers. This is a great way to take out the powerful creatures in an encounter, but the best part is that you can tear a weapon off stronger monsters, which you can then use to clear a room for a limited time. These special weapons are all very cool, but you likely won’t get to use and enjoy them all that often.
Shadow Warrior 3 is a very good game, but I find myself loving it considerably less than Shadow Warrior 2. The action here is still satisfying, but it will have you feeling tired and ready to move on earlier than you might expect. Plus, Lo Wang’s “personality” is, literally, a bit of a joke, and it’s difficult to care about his exploits on any level. Slashing a katana, blasting weapons, and swinging around foes is great, but it doesn’t come together with the magical crescendo I was hoping for. Instead, it feels like a mess of good – even great – ideas that fail to climax together. Lo Wang would love that last sentence, for the record.
Written by Dave Aubrey on behalf of GLHF.
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