Best a samurai-esque Hattori, and you’ll be rewarded with a massive homing cleaver. Each can be dispatched using one hit kill attacks, and a Gore Weapon specific to that enemy dispatch a hulking Oni demon and you’ll knick it’s hammer for a limited time, swinging it around with all the weight of a Skyrim weapon. The enemies do fill different roles at least smaller mobs can be buffed to drop resources ala Doom’s chainsaw mechanic, flying enemies keep you under pressure, and larger enemies deal heavy damage, and keep you on the move. The same goes for grappling, a mechanic that boils down to hitting E on glowing green rings and watching the same animation each time, as Lo Wang flings himself weightlessly across dangers below it’s a fine traversal mechanic, but does nothing to add friction or demand much from the player at all, even as enemies advance. Shadow Warrior 3 falls to staleness too quicklyĪt most, wall running will get you up to a higher vantage point, but in a game with double jumping and air dashing, wall running immediately feels less and less necessary in a combat sense.
You can grapple hook (including extended grapple-hooking navigation segments between combat encounters) and wall run your way around specific parts of arenas, but the usefulness of the mechanic is largely unfulfilled, with Shadow Warrior 3 resorting to putting health pickups on the wall run strips, like an owner trying to tempt their dog into the bath with peanut butter. Which is to say, I never met a wave of demons I couldn’t defeat while air-dashing and emptying every gun in my possession turns out it’s a pretty effective solution against hellish pursuers.Įnvironmental traps like totems of spinning blades and meat mincers the size of barns crop up every now and then, but their effectiveness fails to spice up combat encounters that quickly become harder and harder to differentiate from each other. The intent behind the equal footing given to gun and swordplay in Shadow Warrior 3 is admirable, but while the gunplay mostly feels fine, there’s a rapid standardisation of these encounters that happens, even within the opening hours of the game.
#SHADOW WARRIOR 3 DOOM SERIES#
Players start a level, run and grapple hook down a series of corridors and out-door-idors, enter into a vaguely round room, and thus the killing begins. The problem emerges as the broader gameplay loop becomes clear. Taking advantage of an increasingly bulging weapons wheel and a dedicated ‘right click to katana’ attack, players wall run, grapple, explode barrels and deploy environmental traps as they tear through increasingly vicious waves of enemies later in the game. Looping and weaving through the death traps of Shadow Warrior 3’s arenas is where the game comes closest to success. It means the narrative rarely stops to marinate in the world it’s building, often too concerned with getting you to the next bullet arena or back into the combat, where the majority of the game’s design highlights lie. Owing mostly to the game’s highest priority of maintaining an entirely unserious tone, Shadow Warrior 3’s refusal to truly care about any of the cultural touch-stones it’s taking advantage of kneecaps the game. Significant betrayals and deceptions are passed over in a manner of moments, character relationships are grown and changed with throwaway lines of dialogue, and the cast of the game is so small that the plot starts to feel like a minor group-chat argument between four horrible, irritating people rather than an adventure to save the world.Īside from the core combat experience, everything in Shadow Warrior 3 feels tangential most of all Polish developer Flying Wild Hog’s setting and cultural borrowings from Japanese folklore and mythology, which are given all the thematic weight of decorations for a child’s birthday party. Of course, Shadow Warrior 3 is enthusiastically irreverent to the bone, so the stakes never feel terribly meaningful, yet strangely, the game’s tone is constantly hot-footing between caring too much and too little about its characters and world. What you get with Shadow Warrior 3 is a linear rush across the game’s ‘neo-feudal Japan’ setting, listening to Lo Wang karaoke-ing and quipping his way through largely same-y combat encounters. I never thought I would describe an apocalyptic mission to slay a world-ending dragon as ‘quaint’, but here we are. However, while Shadow Warrior 3 seeks to efficiently trim the series down to a state as razor sharp as a katana, it instead ends up feeling like a slice of life out of a more interesting, expansive game. Paring itself down from the RPG-lite frills of Shadow Warrior 2, a game replete with transferable weapon power-ups, enemy health bars and optional missions, Shadow Warrior 3 emerges from its diligent note-taking during the recent ‘ Doomassiance’ by directly attempting to ape the structure, gameplay loop and progression systems present in both 2016’s Doom and 2020’s Doom Eternal.
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