The lush landscapes and vivid colors look great, owing in part to the excellent performance. The music is actually excellent, as is the presentation of the world. So what’s good about Shadow Warrior 3? Well, the combat is pretty good, even if it’s so derivative of DOOM Eternal that it made me wish I were playing that instead. These two factors combine in a way that made me avoid using this thing whenever possible. There’s no player control whatsoever after the grapple button is pressed, and it also isn’t instantaneous. Sometimes, you’ll be moved around a little before even firing it to accommodate where the game wants you to go, and an agonizingly slow animation will play before you’re sent along a rigid path. When you grapple to one of the giant green circles populating the landscape, I think what happens next is completely scripted. I’m going to try to explain why the grappling hook feels this bad. It feels like trying to get an old pair of AirPods to stay connected to an iPhone. It feels like breaking chopsticks apart, except that one of the tops sticks to the other and splinters. Using Shadow Warrior 3’s grapple hook feels like moving an image around in a Microsoft Word document. I think I’m ready to prove this notion wrong with what I feel is a definitive contender for Worst Videogame Grapple Hook of All Time. “No game has been made worse by the addition of a grapple hook” - this memorable line came courtesy of Twitter, penned by someone I cannot remember the name of.
Presentation outside actual gameplay smacks of Xbox 360-era amateurism. The writing isn’t helped by the awkwardly directed cutscenes which opt for bizarre split screens and ostensibly humorous editing. The greatest irony here is that DOOM Eternal (a game Shadow Warrior 3 takes digs at despite ripping off) is funnier simply because of how effortlessly it integrates humor, rather than shoving it down your earholes every ten to twelve seconds. Honestly, I think the value-to-word ratio here might be the lowest I’ve ever seen. Quips and one-liners literally do not cease, and when the game wasn’t bombarding me with the most eye-glazing and trite humor I’ve heard since Borderlands, it was failing to say anything interesting at all. Every line is delivered with an air of desperation to make the player laugh. The writing in Shadow Warrior 3, as far as I can tell, is made to appeal to 30-somethings who lament the rise of social media, battle passes, and Marvel films. Some combat zones are almost built entirely around utilizing traps for some satisfying mix-ups to combat. Activated by shooting special panels, these traps clear arenas quickly by mulching any enemies caught in their vicinity. Luckily, there are more reliable ways to dole out damage using environmental traps. The drill stolen from a mole-like burrowing enemy seems to have a mind of its own, and a hammer stolen from another is so slow that using it in a crowded arena is a death sentence. I found most gore weapons slow, unreliable, and incredibly awkward to use. These are limited-time use items that are supposed to be powerful rewards for using a precious resource. And there are, of course, “finishers.” These lock you into an overly-long, mid-tier animation that kills the enemy and steals their “gore weapon.” There’s a “chi-blast” ability you can use to create some distance or sling barrels of elemental ordinance at enemies that I literally forgot existed about an hour in. It’s more than a bit derivative, with an arsenal of the usual suspects like a revolver, a shotgun, machine guns, and a grenade launcher. Let’s start with the obvious - the shooting here is pretty fun. Unfortunately, it’s stuck in the past in more ways than one. In fact, Shadow Warrior 3 harkens back to a simpler time of the humble single-player shooter, even more so than its contemporary, Doom Eternal.
Just booting up a title like Shadow Warrior 3 and being propelled into a fresh save with minimal riffraff a la announcements, content updates, or premium passes is a nice change of pace. There’s something refreshing about a simple game nowadays.
0 kommentar(er)
