Shadow Warrior 2 Review (M'aiq the Liar)
This game is easiest to describe as a mix between Doom and Borderlands. The fusion of insanely fast and over the top FPC gameplay mixed with RPG mechanics make Shadow Warrior 2 a huge departure from the previous instalments in the Shadow Warrior series. Apart from a pretty weak story and some more than cringe worthy humour littered throughout the game, Shadow Warrior 2 was honestly a blast to play through. It features a large array of incredibly detailed and highly destructible environments to explore which are procedurally generated, apart from the story mission levels which are pre-set. There's a decent amount of side-quests and story missions to complete, there’s also free DLC which adds some bonus challenges and even more weapon customisation options. As for the actual enemy variation. It’s huge and features an impressive cast of different and colourful enemies to encounter, all of which can have their limbs individually dismembered which was a fun touch. And unlike Borderlands which has randomly generated weapons, Shadow Warrior 2 has around 80 pre-set weapons to find, but can be customised with a seemingly infinite amount of stat-modifiers to find and equip. As well as your weapons your character can be customised with a huge amount of different stat-modifiers as well, and skill points which can be allocated as you wish to level up certain abilities which you find throughout the game. I feel like I spent more of the game figuring out how I wanted to build my character than actually playing the game, it was seriously that enjoyable. The game itself is on the shorter side even if you do all the optional content, but there's a huge amount of difficulties to choose from and the game has new game plus. As well as all this the game has a co-op feature which is what I played in for the most part, but it doesn't work very well unfortunately. The multiplayer loading screens are ridiculously long, and quests that are completed in co-op will only register as finished for the host, which means we had to replay every quest multiple times so we'd all be up to the same point, this also meant we were insanely over-levelled a lot of the time. Other annoying things I noticed as well was that certain events in the game could only be triggered by the host such as collecting quest items, opening doors and triggering enemies to spawn. Despite some rather large glaring flaws I never once regretted my purchase of Shadow Warrior 2. It’s over the top gameplay and its deceptively intricate RPG elements made for a game with surprising depth and enjoyment.