Shadow Warrior 3 caps off a series of three games that has had some weird ups and downs.
2013’s Shadow Warrior was a reimagining of the 90s shooter, 2016’s Shadow Warrior 2 continued things but added some light loot and RPG mechanics to mix things up and now for 2022’s Shadow Warrior 3 developer Flying Wild Hog and publisher Devolver Digital have gone back to basics making something much closer to the 2013 game.
Unfortunately they may have gone a bit too back to basics, but that’s jumping ahead.
The story of this game doesn’t really require that players have experienced the last two modern games and a familiarity with the characters isn’t too important either.
There’s a giant dragon destroying the world and you, the ninja Lo Wang, are the last person who can stop it. You’re joined by ex-billionaire Zilla, a dead god named Hoji and a witch who is so forgettable and unimportant that we’ve already forgotten her name despite only finishing the game a few hours ago.
As you could maybe tell the story and its characters are the first major problem in this game. It’s cool that the main antagonist is a dragon the size of a city that you’re tasked with taking down, but there’s nothing interesting at all to take note of for this story.
The characters are about dimensional as a perfectly flat plane and incessantly bicker far past the point of tedium.
The Shadow Warrior series is known for its dumb humour and dialogue that’s similar to Borderlands in a way, but this isn’t the issue, it’s the fact that the characters are irritating, won’t stop talking and have nothing interesting to say.
Players will be missing nothing by turning of character audio and listening to something else instead.
The gameplay loop of Shadow Warrior 3 exacerbates these problems. Here’s the basic loop of the game: wonder into a combat arena and kill everything until the doors unlock, use dead simple parkour mechanics to navigate to the next arena while listening to the characters endlessly talk, repeat.
Throw in a few cutscenes between those sections until the credits roll.
The funniest part of Shadow Warrior 3 isn’t all the intentional jokes, but the unintentional humour of the inevitable parkour section that will always, always happen right after combat. There’s nothing here to surprise you, no challenge to offer players and simply very little to get excited about.
The grappling hook is mentioned a lot in the marketing of the game and boy, it sure is here, we suppose. It’s mainly used for the parkour sections and, again, never in any interesting ways. There are green hoops dotted around the game that can be grappled to and they will allow players to swing across open spaces.
It can be used in combat to a limited degree and those green hoops will appear in some combat arenas, but it was almost always better to simply rely on the double jump and dodge (along with the trusty circle strafe) to get around and avoid damage.
The combat is the best part of Shadow Warrior 3 but it is similarly kneecapped by a lack of imagination.
Players have a limited arsenal of familiar weapons like a double SMG, bouncing grenade launcher, rail gun, etc. This is augmented by a katana, explosive barrels everywhere, a chi blast to push enemies away and a new mechanic called Gore Weapons.
Like the newest Doom games, in Shadow Warrior 3 you can instantly kill certain demonic enemies to restore health. Some of these demons, however, will grant players limited-time Gore Weapons that are much stronger than the regular guns.
This sounds great on paper but we found ourselves using them less than the game intended. This is because most demons which grant Gore Weapons require several stored charges to acquire. On hard difficulty, which we played the game on, it was usually more prudent to staying alive by using the finisher kills on smaller enemies for less charges simply to refill health.
Lo Wang and his guns can be upgraded with powerups found around the level, almost always in the parkour sections. Some are left intentionally on the critical path for everyone to find while more are hidden away slightly off the beaten track and awarded by completing challenges, usually involving killing enemies in specific ways.
All of this combines to make an FPS experience that’s… fine. The guns look, sound and feel pretty good but almost every combat arena can be solved by circle strafing, holding down the fire button and being cognisant of where the respawning health and ammo spots are.
We have to go back to the Doom comparison here because it’s clear Shadow Warrior 3 took some inspiration from it, but not as it should have. The newer Doom games are sold as “combat puzzles” where players need to use everything in their arsenal, at the right time, to win.
Guns need to be juggled as different enemy types have resistance, strategic use must be made of the flamethrower, grenades and glory kills to keep health and ammo topped up and parkour is important in combat to avoid dying.
Shadow Warrior 3 is nothing like that because most of the guns affect most enemies the same, so you can just keep firing mindlessly until the ammo runs out.
The only real skill players need to have, aside from what’s been mentioned, is quickly swapping between weapons to avoid the reloads.
There is fun to be had here and the designs of the demons and part of the world are genuinely interesting, but the game badly needed some X factor or new gimmick to keep things interesting.
Shadow Warrior 2 had the loot and RPG mechanics that have been stripped away and their absence is definitely felt here.
Things will quickly feel repetitive even though the main story, even on hard, can be blown through in just under six hours.
Shadow Warrior 3 is like drinking warm tap water. Will it keep you hydrated? Sure. Do some people like warm tap water? Also yes. But come on, throw an ice cube or something in there. Spoil us with some juice concentrate or carbonation, just do anything so we’re not consuming matter for the hell of it.
