Shadow Warrior 2

Shadow warrior 2 is a departure from both the dos game (obviously) and also the most recent Shadow warrior 1. No longer is it just a stock standard run and gun mindless shooter, no, now it is kind of a borderlands style 'looter shooter'
I will just list the pros and cons

+Controls feel really fun, you go extremely fast zipping and dashing and flying all over the place at sonic speeds. feels fluid and exciting

+ Huge variety of enemies to fight. Every engagement feels new and unique, you almost never fight the same enemy twice really.

+ Big variety of locations you fight in, although none of them truly stand out

+ Gigantic arsenal of weapons, you are constantly finding some new toy to play with, teres so many weapons you can barely keep track. It's a constant juggle of swapping between weapons, depleting your ammunition and going to the next, watching your enemy healthbars go down. Shooting off rockets, then machine guns, then shotguns etc..

+ Gameplay loop is basic but enjoyable, go to hub world, get a quest and listen to dialogue, then teleport to new zone and fight waves of enemies while picking up tons of loot

+ Graphics are techincally pretty decent with a varied color palette

+ Some of the humor can be slightly funny at times

+ Great co op campaign and doesn't get boring. Really enjoyable oldschool style DOOM type shooter fully playable co op experience

+ Skill trees are pretty interesting but on the flip side I only really got basic stuff like more ammo and stuff like that.

+ Constantly getting all sorts of new loot, gear, armor, stat upgrades etc which is pretty satisfying and enjoyable.


+ Tons of boss fights, although many of them are just circle strafing in an empty room while depleting all your ammo into him without much of a challenge.


Neutral point: Played the game on Second hardest difficulty and it wasn't really much of a challenge at all, despite the game constantly warning me "you are not high enough level are you sure you want to proceed!" because I didn't want to grind sidequests.


Some things I didn't particularly enjoy

- Since it is a looter shooter, combat is based off ever changing rpg statistics. And more often than not, enemies are extremely heavy bullet sponges. Expect to have to shoot 10+ rockets at a single enemy for them to go down. It's almost a pro and a con, it makes engagements last longer, and It can make the flow of fighting a group of enemies fun, but at the same time circling around that one guy for 40 seconds dumping ammo into him slowly seeing his health bar go down can be a little stupid

- Story is stupid and actually kind of annoynig, the characters (especially female) constantly interrupt you yapping in your ear and every single dialogue is a forced attempt at humor, which it rarely hits the mark. Yes its inspired by the DOS original game, but the difference is that game had no cutscenes, and worked off random voice one liners, whereas here you are constantly watching a cutscene or dialogue of some character 1 inch away from your face ranting for minutes on end about shit you don't care about for the sole purpose of making a dick joke or something. it gets old fast.

- The weapon upgrades and loot in general is kind of bloated. There is so much multicolored pinyata stuff flying around with such strange names you don;t know what any of it does. it's mostly used to upgrade your weapons, but at a glance its impossible to tell what youre picking up. And the weapon upgrade system is cool, but I feel its a little convuluted, you have to manually go through this huge list of upgrades for every single weapon and stare at tons of different stats , but really all you end up doing is looking at the DPS number and tediously going through every one to get the highest DPS. it could of been a little streamlined, I didn't think spending 10 minutes manually going through huge lists of upgrades to get slightly more damage was really a big bonus to the game, but felt a little tedious at times. Not that big of a deal but worth nothing.

- The art style in general is questionable especially the weapon design. There is only like 4 weapons that look anything close to traditional, and the rest are extremely over the top bizarre looking crap that take up half your screen. Personally I prefer traditional looking weapons than crazy over the top shit, but atleast they were fun to shoot.


Overall a fairly enjoyable co op campaign oldschool shooter with tons of varied monsters and weapons to loot.

7/10

Shadow Warrior 2 is a sequel to the quite racist Shadow Warrior 2013, which itself was a reboot of the somewhat forgotten 90's shooter. I have no doubt in my mind that its a great game, even more since im actually considering going at it again in NG+, but it has so many flaws and missteps. For starters the jokes and comedy of the game is the sort of stuff that can only really be enjoyable to a 12 year old, the dick jokes get annoying really fast. The story itself is also completly unremarkable. Now, they tried to transition the linear shooter of the reboot into a coop loot shooter as best as they could, but unfortunatly the product got a lot of misplaced body parts along the way. The levels are incredibly repetitive, and the wide open areas arent really filled with interesting loot. The levels are filled with treasure chests, but these contain ammo and money the great majority of the time. THe loot system is really bad, both in terms of the drop rate of actual useful stuff, as well as how boring the stat boosts are. The gem system does little more than increase the DPS of weapons, it doesnt make you change the way you play at all. The levels are reused multiple times, and they get old fast. Its a game that you play for the combat gameplay, and for that alone, and even then it isnt perfect. The enemies are bit too bullet spongey, particularly early on when you're weapons are poor. There is also a bit of impact in the gunfire and the sound design is shit. There is a lot of variety of weapons, and these are fun to use, particularly when they become incredibly powerful in the late game. There is a nice variety of enemies, that behave differently to make you shift your tactics according to enemy types. The bosses are very lackluster though. There is also some issues with the hit detection of the main character, at least thats how i felt. I like the fast movement and dashing ability, as well as all the mayhem you can cause with your weapons and ninja powers. Visually the game is also quite stunning at select times. Its a shame that there are so many flaws in it.