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Shadow warrior 1997 review9/16/2023 It’s got a deliciously retro feel to it, but modernized with all the eye candy we expect now. There are no chest high walls here and I only realized that you could actually crouch due to a loading screen tip telling me. The demonic horde is a little soft, but that just adds to the experience – by stripping down combat to just you, lots of guns and a huge sword, you want to make sure the player can feel powerful when they face off against 30 yammering, jumping demons. A game with this much combat absolutely relies on it being perfect, and it really is well done – Wang’s array of weapons, from submachine guns, flamethrowers and a quad barrelled shotgun are uniformly fun to use. The encounter design is reminiscent of Serious Sam – arena like, often with multiple waves of enemies you have to cleave through before the door to the next area unlocks. Wang is a pretty tough nut to crack, his basic weapon is a katana (the game is set in “asia” after all), but he picks up a wide array of additional tools for disposing of enemies, and my god there are a lot of guys to kill. Not that it matters, Shadow Warrior does a good job of being light hearted enough to pull the parody card whenever it wavers. The constant banter between Wang and Hoji also manages to work well, and it doesn’t stray beyond its welcome, despite being clearly self aware of what the game is. The characters are mostly throwaway or not developed enough to matter, but I found myself developing an attachment to Wang, who – while being a ruthless killer – has a secret lair under his house with his mint edition comic collection and “sweet” battle armour, which he dons after shaving his head (“haven’t you seen the films?”). The Polish developers also managed to capture what seems (at least to my very un-Asian perspective) to be a convincing stab at vague orientalism, making Shadow Warrior more like a wuxia film than Die Hard with swords. Wang is brought into a tale that feels like it was taken out of an ancient proverb, and while it’s not a very personal story for the protagonist, it’s involved enough to make me want to see it through. Surprisingly, the story – told through the oh-so-popular animated illustration manner (CGI turned out to be too expensive once people expected it to look good, that’s why cutscenes are always done like this these days) – has enough behind it to drive the rest of the game. I got the impression that I would somehow also save the world, but the game was never particularly clear about irrelevant details like that. From there, you begin to unlock powers, and piece together what is going on with the help of an amnesiac, wisecracking demon, Hoji. Naturally, this goes horribly wrong when a demonic transdimensional invasion happens at the same time. You start your day of henching and extortion by trying to retrieve a sacred sword – the Nobitsura Kage. You play “Lo Wang” (seriously), a reboot of the character from the original game, voiced by some guy who I suspect is in fact not from Asia. Actually I suppose that’s not really a buddy cop movie at all, but I’m too committed to give up on the comparison now. Shadow warrior is kind of like a buddy cop movie – only one of the cops is an immortal, banished demon, and the other is a sword master, closet nerd, and henchmen for an evil mob boss. Is this another cash in on nostalgia, or something more? Now, 16 years later, Shadow Warrior is back – re-imagined, re-charged and… uh… re-updated by independent polish studio Flying Wild Hog (who previously brought us Hard Reset). It was also a great game (and is now available for free on Steam!). They, in fact, made Shadow Warrior, essentially a Duke 3D Total Conversion with vastly more casual racism and a wafer thin plot. While Duke was a great game (which went on a sordid journey of its own), in the year that followed its release, 3D Realms didn’t sit on its laurels they reskinned and rebalanced the game into a pastiche of Asian kung-fu movie stylings. Cast your mind back to 1997 (if you weren’t alive back then, get off my lawn you pesky kids) Quake was ushering a new dawn of graphics (the much vaunted “origami in brown” look), and the last generation of 2.5D games were being released – one of which you may have heard of: Duke Nukem 3D.
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