Finally finished Shadow Warrior, it took me almost 22h on Insane Difficulty, stats below:
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Length and Progression
A little too long, it could be shorter, but they forced You to some unnecessary fights and made levels too long. Progression is mediocre, it takes too much time [5-6h] to get to good weapons and decent upgrades, fortunately Katana compensates for most of that. I would prefer shorter game focused on difficulty and speed running.
Boss Fights:
Boss fights are terrible, i dont know who thought that was good idea. Even though the idea behind boss fight is quite decent, which nice variety in stages, but execution is very bad. They are long and boring, hit boxes of bosses attacks are awful, You're too slow for certain attacks even with upgraded stamina. Next annoying thing is that they move so much and theirs hit zones are all the time covered by their arms or weapons, which makes it almost impossible to hit with anything other than revolver and uzi, because other weapons have short range or slow projectiles.
Enemies:
Liked most of them, quite a nice variety, lower demons are insane joy to fight with.
Big demons were too big, which made hitting with Katana them annoying, also most of theirs AOE attacks hit You through walls - not cool.
In last few chapters, dev throw at You too many big Demons which are total bullet sponges, with freaking fucked up Charge Demon with weak point on back - who the fuck tested this game and wasnt annoyed by them? Especially the fight with two of them in room with destructible cardboard was awful and unfair.
Level design was from time to time bad too. Flying Wild Hog You cant put tons of enemies with big ones in very tight spots, also why You give player dash when he cant use it effectively?
Weapons:
Katana - Godlike, one of the best weapon ever created in FPP games.
Shurikens - WTF? Totally omitted weapon by devs and they dont even fly in straight line, totally wasted potential for something cool, especially with upgrade system
Revolver - havent upgraded it, but had quite nice damage and aim
Uzi - decent at the beginning when fully upgraded, i used it sometimes on bosses, because there was no better weapon, but generally very weak
Crossbow - upgraded it once on boss and it was terrible, could be decent for demons
Shotgun - havent upgraded it, probably quite good, if reload is fast
Flamethrower - flame damage is terrible, but grenades were quite decent for sub-bosses, very slow though, slow projectiles, extremely short range
Rocket Launcher - terrible, i dont know have can You fuck up something like this, when so many games in the past, did it so great. Very slow projectiles, unresponsive shooting, bugging 3 shot loader etc. Unfortunately You have to use it on many sub-bosses and all bosses, and You'll be annoyed every time, You do it.
Generally i think Flying Wild Hog lacked decent testers, because some of those design flaws are very basic, like for example slow projectiles when You have big bosses in big areas or unresponsive shooting and constant reloading in very fast paced shooter.
Story and dialogs:
Decent story and superb dialogs. I've anticipated every conversation between Hoji and Lo Wang and all fortune cookies advices
Graphics:
Terrible at the beginning, much, much better later on. Very focused art direction and sometimes very gorgeous lighting. Very good use of high quality shaders to enhance textures patterns.
Difficulty:
Too easy for a first few hours, very good later on, except for instances with bad level design as i mentioned earlier.
Game is so hard in later levels that it would be impossible to finish it on gamepad on Insane difficulty. I'm very interested to see how they change difficulty for next-gen consoles
Even with all those flaws, i loved the game. There is not many good FPP shooters this days and Shadow Warrior is one of the best and fastest with excellent melee combat. Its awesome, but flawed game and i hope that it will get bigger and more focused sequel someday with coop feature perhaps
To sum it up, i would say, that I take easily Shadow Warrior like game over any linear, scripted console title, i like Uncharted, but this game is so much more fun to play.
