That’s true most of the time, blasting away the cannonfodder enemies is very satisfying. Before, I mentioned how you feel very empowered with your range of mobility and weapons. Worse yet, some of these unique guys are so engorged with health that you’ll be dumping ammo into them for minutes. This yakuza guy might be an unique and he’s got 30 times the health and is resistant to fire and electricity. And like with the weapons, these enemies can come with a random set of variables, ARPG style. It seems to be the same with the enemies, you’ll be fighting a vast amount of different monsters, robots and yakuza guys and almost every level features some new crazy thing out to kill you. To further complicate things, all the weapons come with three sockets for customization through random crap loot of jewels and artifacts you’ll plug in to give yourself incrementally more powerful weapons or larger ammo capacity or a burning fire effect. And not just reskins or slight variations, there’s over 70 weapons with their own set of animations, sound effects, models and everything. To make the combat even more varied, there is an insane amount of weapons in the game. The melee combat is familiar to the first game, they’ve done some streamlining and adjustments here and there but it still feels good. You move very quickly and with a little familiarity you’ll be almost flying through the levels and through the enemies as well. This time around, you start with a really vast arsenal of movement options jumping, double-jumping, dashing, air-dashing, dodging and sprinting through the game while limbs are flying and guns are firing is incredibly fun. The gameplay itself is really satisfying. Like I said earlier, it is definitely feature packed and content rich. Let’s get back on some of the good things. King Skeletor, covering up an entire school bus behind it A rocketlauncher or a machine gun can easily cover more than a quarter of the screen. What is even happeningĪnd just incase you were concernced that you might be able to see occasionally, they’ve decided to bump up the size of the gun models to ridiculous extremes. The level of visual clutter is just gross at times, to add to grossly blown out particle effects you’ll also see damage numbers pop up when you’re fighting. Each of these upgrades comes with it’s own sparkling particle effect, of course. The game even encourages you to use elemental upgrades on your weapons like fire, ice, electricity and poison. You’ll be drowned in viscera, glitter, explosions, smoke, glares, shines, bright flashing lights and foliage and in the end it’s obscene. The developers seem absolutely obsessed with particle effects and progressing from game to game they’ve only gotten more so. Yet, it’s not all scent of roses and dulcimer tones. The game chugs along slick and smooth at very respectable frame rate and looks stunning a lot of the time. Hard Resetwas their groundbreaking game and the graphical fidelity in that one still stand up to the test of time surprisingly well.

Flying Wild Hog is a pretty solid developer and they know their stuff when it comes to FPS games. The color range is wide and much more than you’d get expect in most games. The graphics are slick and almost opulent, there is some true skill on display. Technically Shadow Warrior 2 is very impressive. Unfortunately it is really starting to feel like the honeymoon period is over and the chinks (heh) are starting to show in the armor. Staggering list of improvements and features that sound like a shopping list for a successful shooter. On paper, Shadow Warrior 2 seems like a perfect sequel to Flying Wild Hog‘s first foray into the series. The game started out very strongly, the level of epowerement given to the player is something to be learned from for the rest of the shooter genre. Picked up Shadow Warrior 2 on a recent Steam sale and have been playing it sporadically, about a third of the way through.

Alt fire shadow warrior 1997