2466: Mess With the Bull, You Get the Wang

[This should have posted yesterday but didn’t for some reason.]

Been playing some more Shadow Warrior 2 and the more I play it, the more I like it.

It’s certainly quite a different experience to its predecessor in that it’s not a case of “always moving forwards”, like in more traditional first-person shooters. Rather, each of the missions you embark on takes place in a huge open-plan zone with lots of different routes through, around, over and under various obstacles. There’s an element of light randomisation to the environments, so they’re never quite the same each time you play, but there’s enough “handcraftedness” about each of them that they don’t feel like the rather drab, lifeless environments of something that is completely randomly generated.

The thing that makes Shadow Warrior 2 a real joy to play is how agile protagonist Lo Wang is. He was pretty agile in the first game, but the sequel kicks it up a notch. He can double-jump, pull himself up onto ledges, sprint and “dash” a short distance in any direction, even in the air. All of these different ways of getting around make the game very much feel like a first-person character action game rather than a simple-first person shooter.

One thing I’ve been really enjoying is that you can build Wang to focus on the type of gameplay you enjoy. If you particularly enjoy getting up close and personal with enemies — and with Shadow Warrior’s excellent first-person melee combat, who wouldn’t? — it’s possible to equip him with items that boost his melee damage in exchange for some of his ranged damage. Then you can load him out with a variety of different short-range death implements, plug three attachments into each one for specialised situations — one for each element is a good start — and you have an unstoppable killing machine, particularly if you beef up his melee skills such as Sting (charge forwards, do a massive amount of damage) or Vortex (a spinning attack on the spot).

As I noted the other day in my first impressions, Shadow Warrior strikes an excellent balance between this sort of stat-tweaking typically found in a more conventional RPG, and the pure thrills of a fast-paced first-person shooter. The lack of enemy levels means that you’ll never reach a point where a rocket launcher does negligible damage to an enemy; instead, you simply start encountering more varied and fearsome foes as you progress through the game, at which point you might want to consider starting to use some of your more powerful weapons.

You’re not obliged to, though, and that’s nice. If you want to play through the whole game with “Lil’ Wang”, his starting katana, you can. If you want to completely ignore the attachments system, you can. If you want to ignore melee combat and play it as a shooter, you can — there are plenty of different guns to enjoy. And the various unlockable skills and powers you obtain over the course of the game enable you to build Wang in a variety of different ways.

And this isn’t even touching on the script, which manages to balance laugh-out-loud humour with some genuinely dramatic moments, much as its predecessor did. It’s delightful in its political incorrectness; a real thumbing of the nose to the perpetually offended who, let’s face it, probably weren’t ever going to play a game like this anyway. And the main story itself is compelling enough to keep you playing, with a veritable encyclopaedia of background reading available in game to flesh out the world and characters.

Shadow Warrior has well and truly grown up. Shadow Warrior 2 is, without a doubt, one of the most enjoyable games I’ve played for a while, and I hope it receives the recognition — and sales — it deserves.