izigame.me

I don't know why people whine about this game not being like Shadow Warrior 2. Shadow Warrior 2 was an annoying grid fest. This game is more like Shadow Warrior's take on Doom Eternal, and better have a reasonable immitation of Doom Eternal than a shitty immitation of Borderlands. With that said, Doom Eternal is superior to Shadow Warrior 3 in any way. The story, the enemy mechanics, the weapons, the upgrades... everything is better. But, it doesn't mean you'll have a bad time playing Shadow Warrior 3. If you liked Doom Eternal, this is an OK immitator, just not a classic by any means.
The good:
Graphics are pretty, story is whimsical. You feel like the writing doesn't give a fuck as much as Lo Wang doesn't give a fuck, and that freed the writers to have a lot of fun with it. This is a game where Lo Wang sucks at being a ninja and teams up with a trash panda, so.. yeah. If you want to fail heroically to success, this is the game for you.
The enemies are very interesting conceptually. You'll see a lot of really strange creature designs that you've never seen in other games before, like that annoying Jack-In-A-Box asshole who shits blades as it runs away from you, laughing maniacally, or mole creatures with a mechanical drill for a nose that dives for cover in the ground, and attacks from underground, but can also fly up and attack from above. Definitely points for creativity.
The bad:
The weapons don't feel very satisfying to use, and that's because a lot of the enemies are bullet sponges, and even grenade sponges. Doom Eternal made you feel like a badass. You actually wanted to face a horde of enemies, because you felt confident in your ability to destroy them. In this game, destroying enemies means wasting all your ammo for a certain gun on one bullet sponge enemy, hoping to not get overrun in the meanwhile, and then running around massacaring the fodder enemies to repelnish on health and ammo, and repeating the process. This doesn't improve with the weapon upgrades either, so ultimately, throughout the whole game, success depends more on your ability to attack defensively (I mean, while dodging well), than attack offensively.
The enemies are creative, but not very fun to fight. The big behemoths with clubs are annoying because they take forever to kill. The mole enemies that burrow underground also take forever to kill because you have to wait for them to fly to the surface before you can attack them (but they sure can attack *you* from underground). The floating heads are a waste of enemy because the trick to killing them renders them mostly useless as a threat. That cooking ghoul feels like it's too slow to keep up with the battle around him. You feel like he really wants to contribute to the battle, but all it ends up doing is just leaving some purple lumps around that act like mines. The red ninjas with the blade take forever to kill. Fodder enemies are kind of meh; somehow the fodder enemies in Doom Eternal felt better to fight, and I can't quite put my finger on why that is. Maybe it's that if you're going to have fodder enemies, either make them enough of a threat to be forth paying attention to, or let me ignore them until I need them. In Shadow Warrior, the fodder enemies are somewhere in the middle. They try to make me pay attention to them by being more of a nuisance than Doom Eternal's brain dead zombies, but they are ultimately not a threat in any meaningful way, so battling them just feels like a mediocre part of the fight.
While the story is amusing, it's not all that great either. Ultimately, it's just there. You won't show this to someone new to gaming as an example of great writing in games.
The verdict? It's worth playing once. It's not a bad game. Maybe get it on discount.