izigame.me

For every improvement over the first Shadow Warrior, something bad was added.
Mobility has been significantly increased and there is no longer that useless stamina limitation.
The weapons gallery has basically been tripled, with very welcome additions of melee weapons and even more ridiculous firearm variants.
Enemies are no longer damage sponges. Feedback is crystal clear. Your weapons have the expected effect and you know exactly how much damage is being done.
You have a progression system that, although it's still boring, is more diverse now and creates more possibilities for customization.
The leap in visual quality was absurd.
And the music is the best in the series (you can see this right in the game menu).
At first glance, almost everything appears to have improved.
However, after a few hours of gameplay, the magic ends. When you realize that the basic, straight-to-the-point, unpretentious formula of the first game has been replaced by something tedious, bloated and even more exhausting.
The self-contained mediocre level design was replaced by open repetitive and unintuitive scenarios of free exploration, without any sense of progression.
Before, for the most part, the game moved at a comfortable pace, alternating between confined arenas with planned enemy encounters and bits of methodical exploration, where you collected resources and hunted for secrets to restock your arsenal or feed the game's tedious progression system. In Shadow Warrior 2, despite the improved mobility (Double jump, infinite stamina, etc.) and a slight increase in verticality in the level design, you can't do anything without an objective marker telling you where to go.
And completing the (always) generic objectives that the game presents to you on your own never seems viable, due to how poor and unintuitive the level design are. It seems like they simply decided to make beautiful scenarios, without thinking exactly what it would be like to play inside them.
Exploration feels extremely artificial. You never feel like you are making progress or discovering anything.
The amount of wasted and purposeless space is unbelievable. As mediocre as it was before, the game's exploration seems to have become even shallower despite the increase in complexity and level size.
And the combat? Combat quickly becomes an inconvenient nuisance, begging to be ignored.
Fights do not take place in confined arenas anymore, but literally everywhere. Every minute. At all times.
The fights completely lost any sense of structure or planning. The enemies are simply there or appear in droves without much consideration for where the fight will take place or whether you already faced the same horde of enemies five seconds ago.
There is no dynamic. The variety of enemies has increased considerably, but now they all seem to be the same thing, without occupying a specific and controlled role within a fight.
Shadow Warrior had few enemies, but if there's one thing the developers achieved, it was expressing the usefulness and cynergy of their combinations to the extreme. Each enemy had a function and required priority levels and specific tactics to be defeated more efficiently. They all looked different.
Enemies in Shadow Warrior 2 are a mob heading for your meat grinder. Even on the highest difficulty, you'll hardly have to consider any tactics or what you're doing other than keeping moving (which is easier than ever) and shooting and slashing.
Combat in Shadow Warrior wasn't anywhere near sophisticated or deep, but it did have some sense of dynamic between you and the enemies. It wasn't simply an almost incomprehensible grindfest.
If on the one hand the controls and feel of the combat improved considerably, Shadow Warrior 2 managed to simplify what was already simple even further instead of building on what worked in the first game.
And the exhaustion of the process of effortlessly facing hordes and hordes of enemies drains any sense of fun the combat could have had, very quickly.
It's as if the game started in the worst parts of Shadow Warrior 1, when you approached the end, and there were endless fights in each room you entered.
This ties into a little RPG system they implemented as a way to strengthen your character.
I frankly have no desire to criticize this. Suffice it to say that from time to time you will have to stop everything you are doing to optimize percentages.
It doesn't work in a game as stupid and mindless as this.
The icing on the cake is the story.
It's even worse, who knows how, than the juvenile yet fun tale of the first game.
You had something resembling charisma and a sense of humor and narrative arcs.
Even, perhaps, a well-made and stylized presentation of a beautiful mythological fable.
Now... Wang doesn't even seem to have a good catchphrase.
If you're hoping for a continuity of the character that ends the first game on a somber and emotional note, you're certain to be disappointed.
It's simply a bad and poorly justified excuse. They told everything that was even remotely interesting the first time. And now the lack of creativity exceeds even my lowest expectations.
And that's it.
I never expected much from the franchise. For me, it was relegated to nothing more than a game of partially appreciable mediocrity, but somehow they outdid themselves. They managed to go beyond their lack of ambition and create a game even shallower than the first.
And look, we're not even talking about the third one. Shadow Warrior 2 is nowhere near rock bottom.

P.S: I ended up dropping the game before I even got halfway through. I've played enough to know that I'm not going to get anything satisfying out of this experience.
It may get better later on, but the core of the experience seems to be what I described. It's unlikely that the game would simply metamorphose into a better version of itself.