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🔰SHREDVIEW🔰 - From someone who actually plays and finishes the games before reviewing.
NOTE: If you like my work, please check out the rest of my reviews, I put a lot of work in these to offer the best overall description of what you’re up against. Thank you in advance!
🔷 ABOUT THE GAME & LORE 🔷
When the world’s falling apart or John Wick needs a hand, you call Lo Wang. Shadow Warrior 2 drops you into a chaotic, demon-infested future where everything’s literally gone to hell and only a wisecracking, katana-swinging mercenary can clean up the mess. Sounds about right, yes? Think of it as Doom on a bender but with swords, guns, and a lot of inappropriate jokes.
It all kicks off with a simple mission gone sideways, landing Wang in the middle of a war between corporations, demons, and some ancient magic that’s way above his pay grade. But do not worry, you have the company of a snarky AI companion as you carve a way through hordes of enemies, trying to fix everything with violence and sarcasm.
Lore-wise, it’s a mix of Eastern mythology, modern corporate greed, and straight-up chaos. It’s Shakespeare on crack, Victor Hugo on absinth, it's fun, it's beautiful and completely fucking nuts. Really nobody's here for the lore tho, this is Lo Wang’s world, and we’re lucky for the ticket.
🔷 THE GAMEPLAY 🔷
👉 GENERAL:
First person action & chaos in its purest form. The game is set on fast-paced combat, throws in katanas, an armory full of ridiculous & cool weapons then cranks it all up with procedural generation and a lot of enemies & mechanics to break them. This isn’t your typical "shoot, reload, repeat" gig but a full-blown massacre with style, speed, and most important: sassiness.
▪︎ The main purpose is kept very simple, very standard format for a FPS, you get main quests, side quests, a few challenges, a few collectibles and A LOT of weapons to either shoot or slice through
▪︎ To keep it fresh, we are looking at a very diverse arsenal with a total of 79 unique weapons including blades, rocket launchers, rifles, chainsaws, shotguns, dragon head machine guns, you name it. You can unlock these as drops from special enemies, story or random loot from containers. Each weapon has 3 slots in which gems can be fitted to boost damage outcome or elemental output.
▪︎ The player skill tree is based on a card system, there are a total of 48 skill cards which can then be upgraded with skill points earned as you level up. These cards are unlocked via story or drop from special enemies, once earned, forever remains. Some cards are given by default from the game.
▪︎ Power Gems are items that can be fitted into weapons as mentioned above, these drop constantly from all sources in different rarity levels ranging from common to legendary, just like weapons, however, everything is balanced, more powerful and rare gems have also a downside to them.
▪︎ Elemental damage is a huge part of the damage output mechanics, they also relate to an achievement for each elemental type so try all of them.
▪︎ Every mission with the exception of few story ones are replayable from the game's map. Make sure you focus on whatever you have to do in the story missions in one go to avoid multiple playthroughs.
👉 NAVIGATION SYSTEM
Game has one map screen and everything is on that one screen, if you find it difficult to navigate the map then go back to school. Other than that, the inventory/upgrades menu takes a while to get used to.
👉 PHYSICS & MECHANICS
Matches the game's environment and fast-paced action properly, meaning devs became water. For the intended gameplay style, the physics don't need to be realistic and they do a great job at it. Of course, there's small things like: Some items spawn under the terrain, you see them on minimap and won’t be able to pick them up, other issue I found was with the air control mechanics, you can’t freely adjust direction, for a game this "kill bill" realistic, that would've made sense!
👉 GRAPHICS & OPTIMIZATION
The graphics are decent. Once you get used to them you'll be fine but it used to put pressure on my eyes due to the very colorful palette and how sped up everything is. You got effects, fire, explosions, projectiles & enemies everywhere. The gane looks comic-book or sci-fi but very well animated. It's not "eye candy" but it shouldn't be either.
👉 ACHIEVEMENTS & COLLECTIBLES
Unexpectedly easy to 100%, I had a good look through a guide and the achievements beforehand and it was piece of cake. I finished everything in 29 hours. 80% of achievements are quest related, every single main quest or side quest has a boss in the playable area and there's an achievement for each including the campaign ones, other than that easy to do and nothing missable if studied well before. At some point you will get powerful enough to just run through all content really easy. I followed this amazing guide: PS: The 1000 masamune orbs and the 10 million coins achievements are really ass and take a while.
🔷 CONCLUSION: 🔷
If you're looking for a quick intense action gig, this is sure not the game you want but the one you need. If you're only looking for a game thats easy on achievements, you'll also have a lot of fun doing it. I have played the original Shadow Warrior when I was a kid, this sure brought up memories and quite a laugh. Really well tailored around it's genre for a weekend quest.
🔷 PROS & CONS 🔷
✔️ PROS:
- Very entertaining fast-paced combat.
- Broad arsenal, many choices, much gore.
- Well used ridiculous factor in the character & story writing.
- Perfect length for its campaign & completion tasks.
- Well optimized, flows like water.
- Unexpected enough.
- Very do-able achievements.
❌ CONS:
- At some point you become very OP.
- Secrets are very annoying to search for.
- Not the most intuitive inventory menu.
- Could've refrained from respawning enemies and let me clear a whole damn map, I could replay it to run through its enemies again
- Fire the companion's voice actor
　🔷 SHORT REVIEW & STATS 🔷
• PLAY STYLE:
🔳 PVP
✅ PVE
🔳 ONLINE CO-OP
🔳 Online Multiplayer
🔳 SPLIT SCREEN
✅ SINGLE PLAYER
• GRAPHICS:
🔳 Fire the designer.
🔳 Fairly old game, what you expect?
✅ Not great, not terrible.
🔳 Great
🔳 Exceptional
• REPLAYABILITY:
🔳 YES
🔳 EVERY NOW AND THEN
🔳 NOT SURE
🔳 RARELY / ON MAJOR UPDATE / DLC RELEASE
✅ NO
• STEAM ACHIEVEMENTS:
✅ YES
🔳 NO (WTF MAN)
• GAMEPLAY:
🔳 WTF IS THIS SHIT
🔳 TERRIBLE
✅ DECENT
🔳 ENGAGING
🔳 HAD A BLAST
• DIFFICULTY
🔳 DARK SOULS
🔳 BAFFLING
🔳 CHALLENGING
✅ MEDIUM
🔳 WALK IN THE PARK
• STORYLINE:
🔳 A WHAT? WE WRITE CODE NOT BOOKS
✅ GOES FINE WITHOUT ONE
🔳 DECENT
🔳 ENGAGING
🔳 SHAKESPEARE AINT GOT S**T ON THIS
❗ NOTE - This is a review based on personal preferences and opinions. I always suggest you try the games for yourself before letting others decide for you. Even though we're all gamers, we are sure not the same.