So I just finished Shadow Warrior (2013) and I wasn’t blown away by it but I had a decent time. I always like hearing about experiences that people had with the game when it first came out and whether or not a modern perspective paints it differently.
To summarize what I thought: The writing is humorous, but not outright funny to me. The graphics hold up very well and the gore is great. Combat is mostly pretty good. Some enemies are annoying or overly difficult on the hard difficulty but overall it’s pretty good.
I did think it was modeled to be kind of akin to a Serious Sam type game and it lives up to that but similar to that game, many of the weapons/enemies/levels overstay their welcome a bit. Other than that I had a pretty good time with it, thought it was an 8/10 fun time.
What’s everyone’s story with this game series? When did you first play it and what did you think about it?
I think I share a lot of your thoughts and they apply pretty cleanly to my experience on hard difficulty as well. I can’t imagine insane difficulty just because as you said it’s like walking a marathon except the marathon is longer.
That and there are many many instances of damage in this game that are just basically impossible to avoid and deal way too much for group scenarios. Like yes I’m busy fighting 15 of the low level grunts but I took a third of my health in damage from some mob pounding on the ground out of my view.
Also maybe this is just a controller thing but the combos were infuriating to activate. Most of the time they would be ignored as inputs unless I was very deliberate and they never really flowed properly.
A bizarre decision was to use combos like moving the left stick right twice and left trigger to heal. Instead of just… hold right on movement and press left trigger. That was only done because they needed two attack buttons for some reason even though holding the right trigger for a heavy attack would have worked just fine.
What’s even more funny is that the victory lap you asked for is in there. It’s just not a level, it’s the ramp up to the final boss area. And I recognized it for what it was and got pretty disappointed that I could only use the sword that this entire game has been working up to for like a total of 3 minutes on mobs. That’s insane and just plain bad design for an FPS like this. Now reflecting on it I’m not sure if I’d land at the 8 I initially said. I think it’s a 7 or maybe even a bit lower for me
I think the combos were easier on mouse and keyboard but the controller controls were fine too. I don’t remember it super well but wasn’t the secondary attack completely different for some weapons? I don’t think holding primary for secondary attack would work.
Oh right, that was a thing
Yeah I’m not sure why I had so much trouble doing the controller combos but they would trigger fine sometimes and other times not at all. I just think doing combos with the movement stick is awkward in general because I have to move differently to activate them and can’t go where I want for a moment.
And yes the secondary attack for some weapons is very different, that is true but the game oddly doesn’t make much use of the bumpers so it would have been easy to do a combo button that way.
The way I would’ve done it probably is just to make the left stick a modifier button that made it to where you could do LT+A,B,X,Y combos to heal and what not. Holding LT+Left stick direction+attack would do the katana combos. And then just use RB for the alt fire button.