#SHADOW WARRIOR 2013 CODE#

You go into a partially sunk freight ship and a waterlogged, metallic side-room has the exact same shiny furniture as a billionaire’s bedroom. While visually impressive from afar, the texture quality is pretty bad up close and you see the same decorations literally everywhere. The game mixes generic areas like sewers and a dockyard with a lot of Japanese locales.

The realistic visuals are an eyesore, with especially the gore looking plastic-y and areas suffering from being underlit of course made worse by a flashlight so pointlessly small you might as well navigate by muzzle flashes. Levels in Shadow Warrior are painfully generic and ugly. While the gameplay generally lives up to this, the level-design and art certainly do not. So, story is a mixed bag, but I held out hope that we could at least have an old school run & gun experience here. The ending was also very nice and did a lot to make up for the frustrations I felt throughout the rest of the game. It took a while for me to get interested in it and it felt boring in places, but it was ultimately the characters involved and how personal the storyline was to them that won me over. Shadow Warrior has some big ambitions and tells a complicated fantasy story that draws from real-world elements without copying anything 1-to-1. The rest of the story is a bit of a slow boil. He doesn’t even have any funny dialogue with the naked anime girls It would have been cool if they went the Deadly Premonition route and made constant references to movies Wang likes or stuff that inspired him, but instead the highlights of the game end up being references to Wang’s elderly self. I was desperately trying to find some aspect of him I could latch unto, yet found nothing. This leaves him as little more than a corporate lackey stumbling about the plot, murdering anybody and anything that happens on his path.

#SHADOW WARRIOR 2013 CODE#

The same goes for his samurai lifestyle and supposed code of honor, which are also only incidentally addressed. His geeky hobbies are rarely brought up and don’t affect his dialogue much, outside of Hoji calling him a nerd from time to time. Hoji ends up stealing the show because Wang has nothing going for him. I admire that they tried to modernize a character that was already perceived as racially insensitive back in the day, but the modern Lo Wang lacks any kind of punch. There is no joke or levity to his character, and the edgy arc he works through feels painfully out-of-place. Now he’s a cool anti-hero a young, handsome dude who casually flirts with women and shouts generic action game taunts as he blasts and cuts his way through hordes of enemies. Lo Wang used to be this elderly pervert who’d laugh his way through combat encounters with funny one-liners and an endless supply of dick jokes. It certainly has its moments and Hoji can be entertainingly snide in his banter, but I feel it doesn’t quite nail the atmosphere that would be ideal for this kind of game.įans of the original Shadow Warrior will certainly miss the tongue-in-cheek, comical atmosphere of that game. This turns the story in a bit of duo-cop movie, as Wang and Hoji investigate where the sword has disappeared to and constantly bicker over their conflicting goals and approaches. This Hoji offers to save Wang’s life… if only he’d agree to a tiny, little contract with him. Wang is then left bleeding out in a burning building, where he is approached by the mysterious spirit Hoji. Not long after it turns out that the collector is dead and the sword is gone. When the deal goes wrong, Wang witnesses the beginning of a demon invasion from the confines of his cell. Wang has to either purchase the sword or tear it from the collector’s cold, dead hands. Wang has become filthy rich through his work as an assassin and is now on a job for the powerful businessman Zilla who wants to buy a collector’s famed katana. He is a cocky nerd whose fascination with action movies and video games did not stop him from becoming an actual master swordsman. The game stars a much younger Lo Wang, who feels inspired by No More Heroes‘ Travis Touchdown. This era of remakes and nostalgia for retro games has brought us a lot of interesting projects, but I feel that, in many ways, Shadow Warrior is one of the bad examples despite making bold steps forward as well.

Shadow warrior 2013