Shadow warrior 1997 review8/28/2023 ![]() The weapons themselves range from real-world (ish) pistols, rifles, shotguns and launchers based on recognizable platforms such as the Desert Eagle, G-36 and Carl Gustav recoilless rifle, to demonic weapons fashioned literally from flesh and bone, to name a few. ![]() After all, I’m a writer, not a numbers guy, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t pour over percentages and decimal points. It is the most addicting upgrade system I’ve been in a shooter in a long time. I carried the starting revolver with me all the way into the final boss, giving it ice elemental properties early on and constantly adding better upgrades when I found them. ![]() The beauty of this system over others in similar games is the sheer viability of every weapon in the game if you spend enough time upgrading it. Almost every enemy will drop some sort of upgrade, more if it is a high-ranking unit, and each weapon comes with three upgrade slots (though some special weapons come with one permanently slotted with a unique one) to turn it into whatever you want. With the new loot system comes a host of new weapons and upgrades to mix and match, and tinkering with your weapon, armor and power upgrades will be how you spend most of the time you don’t spend fighting or in cutscenes. This loop of shooting and looting, on the other hand, is where this sequel shines. This emptiness proves to be one of the game’s weakest points, especially when one of the most addicting parts of the first game was exploring each new level and finding secrets – here the emphasis is less on careful searching and more on blasting through the opposition to harvest their loot drops. While the levels are beautifully rendered and oozing with style and fantastic visual design, the eye candy starts to wear thin long before the credits roll. It is these zones that are the starting points for the procedural generation, and you will spend the majority of your 30-35 hours running through the same areas over and over again, only at night and with slightly different enemy composition. These include Zilla City, an ultra-advanced cyberpunk cityscape full of harsh blues and neon, the Shadow Hills, highlands dotted with temples and abandoned villages crawling with demons and mutated animals, and Calamity Town, a suburb surrounded by treacherous forests and cliffs. ![]() There are around five different distinct locations that are reused, despite the mission markers on the map pointing to vastly different places. The game makes use of procedural generation for things like enemy composition, weather and other aspects of the levels for each mission, while recycling the same basic zones. In a stark departure from the first game’s carefully crafted, linear levels, Shadow Warrior 2 plays more like a Borderlands title, with enemies exploding into a shower of money, upgrades and ammo in addition to all the blood and guts. All of this can be done alone or with up to three friends in cooperative, though I played solo. Their efforts to get Kamiko back into her body set the stage for the rest of the game, which has Wang traveling to several locations via Kamiko’s teleporting abilities to do main and side missions for various colorful NPC quest givers, returning every so often to the game’s hub area to turn in quests, obtain new ones and buy and sell loot and ammo. Circumstances conspire to once again put someone’s soul inside his head, a young woman named Kamiko, Zilla’s top scientist. Lo Wang finds himself working as a mercenary, this time for the Yakuza retrieving a demonic artifact. Zilla Enterprises, the sinister corporation for which protagonist Lo Wang used to work, now has an even greater monopoly on every industry, with Zilla himself profiting greatly in money and power as a result of the crossover of dimensions. The sequel picks up five years after the ending of the first game, and now has demons and humans coexisting, albeit reluctantly. The remake was a bit of a cult hit, and quite a pleasant surprise for me when I picked it up on a whim during a gaming drought. Shadow Warrior 2 is the sequel to 2013’s Shadow Warrior, itself a remake of a 1997 FPS from the same team behind Duke Nukem 3D.
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