izigame.me

I love Shadow Warrior 2013 and Shadow Warrior 2.
For this game, Flying Wild Hog decided to copy Doom Eternal's mechanic of having very small ammo pools and forcing you to use all the weapons. Unfortunately, there's no mechanic like the DE chainsaw to regen ammo. There's not enough ammo spawns in the arenas, too many enemies, and the fight arenas are the size of postage stamps. Is that a console issue? I thought we were past that shit. The weapons are also very unsatisfying and under-powered too.
And what were they thinking with the enemy design? They're so goofy. There aren't any really obvious or effective counters with specific weapons against specific enemies. And everything seems to be a bullet sponge.
I'm playing (or was) on Hard, I believe. Is this balanced for NG+ or something where you already have a full game's worth of upgrades or am I just missing too many shots? I feel like I dash around the arenas, burn ALL of my ammo, and still have half a dozen enemies attacking me...while I've already grabbed the couple of ammo and health items and have nothing left. Then I die.
The parkour feels floaty and I die often because I lost my double jump or dash or just didn't magnet onto one of the big green vine patches. On the other hand, the level / encounter design means that there are constant checkpoints, so it's not terribly awful to die doing that. It's just annoying. Some of the other reviews mention the parkour being really frustrating later in the game.
The chi spells or whatever from the previous two games don't seem to be in this one. I really miss that. Pulling out your katana/melee and doing a fighter-style key press combo to heal or shoot a wave of energy at your enemies or just do a dash/stab move with the sword was a really fun mechanic in the last two games. I don't understand why you would cut *literally the best mechanic* from the previous two games and not use it in the third game in the series.
The level design is also really frustrating. They have areas that look like somewhere you could realistically go, but it's blocked by an invisible wall or you slide on the ground back into the arena. It's really confusing because previous games in the series (or other FPS/TPS games in general) often allow you to go in areas that appear to be out of bounds to find secrets. So I end up wasting a lot of time seeing if I can really go "OOB" here, or is it really not intended for me to leave this area? Secrets, or invisible walls? WHO KNOWS!
This is extra annoying, by the way, given that the game has a LOT of parkour in it between sections. Fight arena, parkour, fight arena, parkour. This little rock at the edge of the arena that I'm trying to jump over to see if there are secrets on the other side, yeah, you can't jump over that. This tiny rock is impassable. But the intended path out of the arena is a parkour section that no human would realistically be able to do. It's confusing and bad design.
This game is awful. What a disappointment. I'm not even going to bother finishing this because it just isn't fun.
Honestly, go play SW2013 or SW2 if you're looking for this style of game. Or, if you're looking for this exact playstyle, go play Doom Eternal instead.