Shadowgrounds: Survivor

cons

- really ambiguous level design. not sure if youre suppose to be killing everything, looking for switches, going to the end point etc. sometimes you can run past enemies to progress, other times not. never clear which.

- jarring switching back and forth between 3 different characters which limit your weapons. each character has a weapon set. the woman character has a sniper rifle and is by far the worst and is incredibly hard to play as and she barely has any ammo. for these segments you simply just run past all the enemies. the other two guys are tanks with assault rifles / shotguns

- enemy variety is boring and limited. its all some form of little insect or alien thing. some of them have guns others just run up to you and attack. nothing has any real impact.

-sometimes there are barricades that are required to blowup to progress the map. however the problem is these are incredibly ambiguous as the game has zero sense of direction on where to go.

- weapons overall 'just work' they arent fun to use or have any power behind them.

-very boring level variety in general. everything is a form of wet dark road, a military steel complex. or a very brief desert canyon segment that you just run past.


pros
+gane is very short only takes 2 hours so its not a slog to get through
+some of the new physics addictions are fun blasting things around
+doesnt take its self too seriously. limited story. some wacky cutscenes that feel like they were taking notes from team fortress 2 or something.
+nothing really going for it other than its medicore action game thats extremely short so by the time youre very bored the game is over anyway

4/10

The first Shadowgrounds kind of typified the linear top-down shooter type in terms of design and was overlong, but had its moments. Survivor attempts to establish more of an identity for itself by offering multiple characters with multiple skill-sets, but this makes the balance and level design suffer. It's just hard to imagine quite what the developers were hoping to accomplish beyond the most surface level aspirations with such a change.