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TLDR: A spectacle shooter with next to no depth. After the decent campaign is over, you can’t help but ask, “Is that all?”


PROS:

✅Stylish
✅That Wang humor
✅Fast, frantic, fun combat

CONS:

➖Massive FPS drops
➖Bugs
➖Huge departure from previous Shadow Warrior entries
➖Not much to do after campaign
You can find my previous Shadow Warrior reviews here:
SW1 - https://steamcommunity.com/id/Synikx/recommended/233130?snr=1_5_9__402
SW2 - https://steamcommunity.com/id/Synikx/recommended/324800?snr=1_5_9__402

Content (Game world/Narrative/Length) –

Game World: Shadow Warrior 3 (SW3) takes place on an Earth destroyed by a large dragon. You are somehow one of the last remaining humans left after a dragon that came from somewhere obliterated everything..
Like its predecessors, SW3 is a first-person game. Unlike its predecessors, the world is largely platforming and grapple-oriented. You’ll spend the majority of the time jumping and dashing between platforms to get to the next “fight arena”, with some small occasional encounters with enemies between arenas.
Also, I did find the game world to be generally bright and vibrant. Almost like a fantasy-esque Chinese fable.
Overall, I think the game world is good, if you can get past the large differences between SW1 and 2 and are into parkour games, as SW3 is about parkour 50% of the time.
Narrative: Lo Wang returns as the ninja assassin from SW1 and 2. This time a dragon has destroyed half the planet and Wang needs some help in putting a stop to it.
Overall, subpar. I mean to be fair, SW1/2 were not narrative powerhouses either, so I’d say that a lackluster story is fairly par for the course here. Still, when you have such a simplistic game with much of the complexities removed like going from SW2 > SW3, then I’d hopefully expect more thought put into the story, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here.
Length: Short, the main campaign will take about 5.5 hours, there isn’t many paths to explore or deviations, so expect around that time. Furthermore, there is a lack to do after the campaign.

Gameplay (Mechanics/Difficulty) –

Mechanics: While SW3 tends to depart from its predecessors in massive ways, the one major aspect that stays consistent between all 3 games is its first-person action combat. SW3 has glorious blood-pumping combat that is frantic and fun. You quickly amass an arsenal of weapons, 6 guns plus your sword. Each is different and allows Wang to approach fights from multiple styles. Granted, ammo is generally limited, so you’ll be swapping constantly between weapons instead of always playing with the grenade launcher or sniper, but I like how each weapon allows you to shift your playstyle to take advantage of their strengths. Also, with no right click to aim-down-sights, each weapon is further focused on what they excel at.
So yes, the combat is great and I enjoyed it. Aside from the combat, SW3 doesn’t offer too much mechanically, much of the game is a step back from SW2. I’d say that SW3 is most closely related to SW1, but with some modern changes and a big departure of the narrative structure and level design, verticality taking precedence.
With SW3, you lose all the loot options of SW2, there is a very simple upgrade system for each weapon and 4 for each aspect of Wang’s character. A huge simplification from SW2.
Chi powers have also been neutered and you're left with a push (Chi Blast) that has a short cooldown, further emphasizing the focus on gun/swordplay.
I’d say my biggest problem with the otherwise great combat is some of the enemies are a tad frustrating and really slow the pace time, namely the masks that shoot beams, and the drill enemies that jump up from the ground. I groan when I see these because they have innate survivability that causes fights to drag on. Alternatively, I don’t want to waste my execution on them because I’d rather use it for the flying eyeball, or the gatling guns.
Overall, the big showcase of SW3 is the combat, but the game doesn’t even do anything with it aside from the short campaign with the mediocre narrative. It's great, but it could be so much better if there was actually a game to play other than the story.
Difficulty: I played on normal mode and found the game to be reasonably difficult. The hardest part is in each battle arena, knowing where the health pickups are because as waves of enemies spawn, you’ll generally be taking constant damage and need to disengage to refill health, which can only be done via floor pickups, aside from a small upgradable regen.

Graphics (Quality/Performance) –

Quality: Graphics are superb. The areas are vibrant, lush, and have a fantasy-esque vibe to them. When I’m not hit by stagginger performance drops, the game is beautiful.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3398811270
This would be an easy 9 or even 10, but the performance/technical issues dropped it down for me.
Performance: Occasionally, bad. I played around with the settings a ton - I started maxed and swapped between DLSS, Vsync, Nvidia Reflex, FPS cap, all trying to stop the literally 100 (!) FPS drops I was getting constantly. It became so bad that it caused at least one death during platform jumping. I even turned the game to low settings and still experienced huge drops, which leads me to believe it's an issue with the game or engine, not my system. I’m getting no drops in other games, and restarting my computer had no effect. I also monitored my GPU usage and was on average around 50-60%. I’ll say that this also greatly impacted the first few levels of the game for me, with the performance seeming to be better as I progressed. From researching, this seems to be an ongoing issue with Unreal Engine 4 and shaders. I found no real fix.
I also encountered numerous bugs. There is a gun with a slowdown mechanic, the slowdown mechanic got stuck within the game then caused all enemies to permanently move slower. Also I got stuck on the environment a few times and had to reload from checkpoint. Thankfully, the checkpoint system is frequent.
i9-13900KF | RTX 4090 | 64GB RAM | 1440p @ 240hz | installed on SSD

Audio (Sound Effects/Music) –

Sound Effects: Good. There are solid combat sounds and the voice acting is similar to the past SW games, no real issues here.
Music: Not bad, kind of like a modernized Chinese/hip hop influenced soundtrack. It didn’t really get me into the groove of the combat, but also didn’t detract from the experience.

Replay Factor (Longevity) –

Not great. Other than the very linear story that throws almost every achievement at you after a single playthrough, the only other options are NG+ or survival mode. NG+ is just the same thing over with the weapons already unlocked, and survival mode is fun for one or two goes.

Final Verdict –

Shadow Warrior 3 to me feels a bit rushed. There just isn’t the love and care that SW2 had, nor the fan service that SW1 had. I would love to get deeper into SW3, but there just simply isn’t much to do. What’s there is great, but after 5 hours, I’d want more.
Still, I’d consider it worth a purchase on sale if you are a fan of modern DOOM’s style of FPS.

Recommend?


Yes

You can find my curator page here: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/Synik_GR