The enemy roster can get a bit thin, especially since some of them are re-skins from other in-game factions, but there are a ton of enemies and a bunch of places to kill them. If you just want a game that lets you mindlessly kill lots of things, I don’t think Shadow Warrior 2 is half bad. You can double-jump, you can dash (both on the ground and in the air), you can summon spikes out of the ground to impale your enemies, you can use your chainsaw to systematically remove demon limbs, you can spin in a circle and lop off six robot heads in one stroke of your sword.īy game’s end my arsenal included a dual-bladed chainsaw made of demon skin, a shotgun that looked like an old blunderbuss and lit enemies on fire, a glove that shot a beam of lava, two claws I chopped off a demon, a pair of scimitars, and like two dozen other weapons hanging out in my inventory. Shadow Warrior 2’s story is weak, its pacing is all over the place, but I can almost forgive it because combat is a damned good time. Shadow Warrior 2 might not be a linear Doom-esque corridor shooter, but at best it’s a not-so-linear-but-still-pretty-linear-because-the-alternative-is-boring shooter.Īnd that’s a shame because it detracts from Shadow Warrior 2’s strengths-namely, murder. There’s so much space! So much stuff to explore! Why wouldn’t you want to go rooting through all of it? But there’s simply nothing out there. Get in, kill the semi-hidden enemy, accomplish the objective, get out. I played the first few hours like I might’ve played the previous Shadow Warrior-looking in every nook and cranny, trying to uncover secrets, trying to find anything useful.ĭon’t.
In fact, I’d posit if you spend too much time exploring each level you’ll make yourself miserable.
#2013 shadow warrior game engine full
Going off the beaten path? Not worth your time, unless you want to grind enemies or are excited to open hundreds of chests full of interchangeable (read: boring) stat-boosting items, money, and ammo.
#2013 shadow warrior game engine free
Most of the time you encounter said enemy on the way to your objective, and then are free to head straight to the end.
In Shadow Warrior 2, each level contains a single unique, named enemy that nets you a bonus achievement upon death, plus-the best part of the game-a new weapon. With Diablo or Borderlands or (changing genres here) any RPG, there’s always that chance you might find an amazing item hidden away somewhere. The levels are huge, but there’s no incentive to explore.
Side quests are the weakest part of the game though-not just because they disrupt the story but because they mostly involve going to a huge, wide-open area, ignoring 90 percent of it, following a line straight to your objective, and murdering a few people/creatures/demons along the way.Īnd this is really Shadow Warrior 2’s problem.
(It’s only twelve hours even if you do literally every mission. You might as well just go do the sidequests because…well, why not? There are only four or five per story section, and skipping them just makes the game shorter. It’s much more banal, the preponderance of go-here-kill-this missions made worse because they’re coming from characters who show up with barely any context and depart the same way.Īnd instead of one unbroken chain, Wang’s story is now picked up piecemeal from other characters in a “quest” system that feels entirely unnecessary and isn’t nearly as freeform as it pretends to be. Where Shadow Warrior had you literally trying to murder the gods, Shadow Warrior 2 is mostly about picking up Wang’s mess. The sequel isn’t quite as larger-than-life as the last game though, and that’s a shame.