Shadow Warrior Review (Cahalith)
Playing the 2013 Shadow Warrior reboot again, some 10 years after its original release, I’ve come face-to-face with one of the supreme ironies of the whole retro shooter revival movement: Today's (indie) shooters are actually much better at being 90s throwbacks than most attempts at creating retro shooters in the decade-and-a-half directly following the 90s.
Back in the early 2010s, the vast majority of first-person shooters were still in lockstep with the Call Of Duty model: Regenerating health, slow movement accentuated by a heavily limited sprint ability, linear levels focused on set-pieces and so on. Back then, it felt truly ‘retro’ when games such as Bulletstorm, Wolfenstein: The New Order, Hard Reset or Duke Nukem Forever went against some of these design principles in an attempt to harken back to the ‘good old days’. But much like its contemporaries, the 2013 Shadow Warrior reboot suffers from the fact that developers back then weren’t willing to fully commit to that vision yet.
Hence, Shadow Warrior is a mixture of old and new design ideas that feels very ungainly after having experienced the likes of Turbo Overkill, Cultic, Amid Evil, Dusk, Hedon, Ion Fury etc. For one, Shadow Warrior tried to bring back quick movement to its generation of shooters, and I think this might actually be the first of these games to introduce a quick dash. But at the same time, Shadow Warrior also has an incredibly limited sprint ability. The level design isn’t quite ‘corridor-followed-by-corridor’, but it’s still fairly linear and stops the action pretty regularly for in-game cutscenes. Some of the weapons don’t quite pack the punch they probably should (SMGs) and some of them are surprisingly slow and awkward to use (crossbow, rocket launcher). In general, switching weapons is much slower than what's good for a game with such small clip sizes and comparatively long reload animations. There’s invisible walls and instant-death out-of-bounds areas that look like you should be able to reach them easily. And while there’s no regenerating health (the bane of many a retro shooter fan), you do have an active healing ability that you’ll need to use frequently, especially on higher difficulty levels.
None of that is to say that Shadow Warrior is a bad game. The fact that I mentioned Duke Nukem Forever early on in this review should make you realise that there are definitely worse shooters from that era to go back to. But I also feel like there are few reasons to revisit Shadow Warrior’s odd in-between design in the 2020s, except as a historical curio. Shadow Warrior may have been an important building block that probably helped us get to where we are today, and it’s still enjoyable in its own way – but it’s also very flawed in many other ways. In short: If you’re interested in shooter history, buy this one when it’s on sale to get a few fun evenings out of it. But if your budget requires you to choose between this and any of the more recent retro shooters I’ve mentioned above, then it’s just no contest…