Shadow Warrior 3 is, at its beating, humongous, dragon-sized heart, intensely silly. Yes, there are an abundance of evil, and ugly, demons. Yes, combat is fast and frenetic. And, yes, its can also be extremely gory. However, the main protagonist is a pop-culture referencing, wash-out ninja called Lo Wang (with all the Wang jokes that implies), the game-world is crazy (and includes world-eating dragons, mystical trash-pandas and enraged rabbit-gods), the weapons ludicrous, and the in-game encyclopaedia firmly tongue-in-cheek. Its almost as if someone looked at Doom Eternal and decided that what it really needed was more humour. And, if you’re like me and are fond of silliness, that’s no bad thing.
In fact, for anyone who’s played Doom Eternal, Shadow Warrior 3 is refreshingly familiar. Both feature a form of push-forward combat which encourages players to play aggressively to recover health and ammo from downed enemies. Both use combat arenas separated by traversal puzzles. Both feature gory mêlée takedown animations. But the more you play, the more it becomes obvious that Shadow Warrior 3 is doing its own thing.
The gory mêlée kills, for example, are a strictly limited resource. Not only do they allow you to instantly kill any foe excepting bosses, they also grant you a temporary, insanely powerful (and often just insane) weapon based on the foe killed. One, for example, may leave you with what is, for all intents and purposes, an ice grenade which freezes any enemies caught in its blast radius. Another, which spins and shoots lasers, may allow you to turn the arena into the worlds most lethal disco.
This has an interesting impact on combat. In most games of this type, I find myself trying to ignore the lesser foes and take down the biggest threats first. However, more than once, I found myself keeping the most dangerous enemy ‘in reserve’ (despite the risk that entailed) until I could ‘harvest’ it for weapons. Also, the game doesn’t shy away from throwing what, in a straight-up fight, would be an overwhelming number of high-level foes at you.
In such instances, victory depends not only upon your mastery of your weapons (which range from a sword to machine guns and strange, circular-saw throwing crossbow), and whatever you managed to (literally) tear from your dead foes, but also mastery of the environment. This leads to combat being a curious mix of outright aggression, coupled with evasive manoeuvring. At one moment, players will be racing towards foes, flailing away at them with an arm they just acquired off an ogre-like demon (don’t ask – this game takes disarming foes literally), and the next, they’ll be running desperately for their lives, jumping and swinging from platform to platform, madly trying put some distance between them and the enraged horde whilst trying to line up a shot to activate a spinning blade trap which will hopefully level the playing field. Its different, a definite challenge, and quite fun.
Outside of combat, movement by itself is also quite enjoyable. Rather than sedately trotting from combat encounter to combat encounter, players instead wall run, dash, jump, grapple and bounce their way through an epic oriental landscape. While these sections start off relatively sedately, they quickly become extended obstacle courses, where a single misstep means death.
While I found both combat and movement enjoyable, what really added to it was the dev’s excellent grasp of pacing. Just as you’ve gotten comfortable with what you’re doing – whether its swinging around the environment like a demented Spiderman, or have mastered a particular foe – the game mixes things up, adding different challenges, new foes or novel weapons. Also, the game does have some breathtaking moments and locations in it. Whether it’s a snap-frozen forest with a tree that would put Avatar to shame, or a stunning vista from atop a demon-infested dam, there are moments where you simply have to stop and admire just how good the game looks.
While there are a few criticism I can level at the game, such as rather stiff kill animations and the occasional model that looks more like a plastic toy, these really didn’t detract from my overall enjoyment, and I frankly had a blast. And while I would caution FPS players who dislike silly humour are not fond of platforming, for all the rest this is easy to recommend.■