Tag: flying wild hog

2459: Double Wang

0459_001

Having finished Shadow Warrior yesterday, I was considering picking up its sequel, which released today. Then someone said some magic words that stopped all consideration and caused me to hit the “buy” button immediately.

But let’s rewind a moment to yesterday evening, while I was playing through the rest of the first game.

Shadow Warrior has a skill system whereby double-tapping a direction and using either the left or right mouse button will perform different special moves. There’s a powerful thrust attack, a “sword beam” type affair, a spin attack, a crowd-controlling stun, a healing spell and a protection spell. Because they’re mapped to controls you’re already using for movement and attacking, weaving them in while you’re avoiding and attacking enemies is pretty straightforward.

Hmm, I thought to myself while I was playing, contemplating the fact that Shadow Warrior had a rudimentary levelling system in place, whereby you could upgrade passive and active skills as well as your weapons by expending various currencies that you acquire through play. I wonder if a first-person Diablo would work?

Some of you may, at this point, wish to raise Borderlands as evidence that yes, a first-person Diablo would indeed work, but I was thinking more focused on the melee angle, since that was a key part of Shadow Warrior’s appeal.

Oh well, I thought. I doubt it’ll ever happen, even if it would probably be really good.

This morning, I Googled Shadow Warrior 2 to see what press and public alike thought of it. One of the first things I saw was “Shadow Warrior 2 is first-person Diablo.”

Magic words. Bought. (And with a nice discount for owning some of developer Flying Wild Hog’s other work!)

It’s not an exaggeration to call Shadow Warrior 2 first-person Diablo, either. It has loot, colour-coded by rarity. It has a variety of different weapons. It has clear ways to “build” your character. It has skill trees that you can beef up as you gain levels. It has quests. It has four-player co-op. It even has a small amount of procedural generation, but it wisely limits this to just parts of levels, so there’s still very much a hand-crafted feel to the whole experience.

So far, I actually think I like it better than Borderlands, for one very simple reason: all your level does is provide you with skill points that you can pump into your various active and passive skills. Enemies don’t level up, and your stats don’t scale with your level, either. This helps prevent the ridiculous situation you sometimes find yourself in in Borderlands where you fire a rocket into someone’s face and it does a miniscule amount of damage. It also prevents “overlevelling”, where you find yourself in a situation where enemies are providing you with so little XP that it’s barely worth killing them.

I’m undecided as to whether I like it more than the first new Shadow Warrior as yet. I’m pretty sure I do. I certainly like it very much indeed — to the degree that if I don’t see it on some Game of the Year lists at year’s end I’ll be very disappointed — but it has quite a different structure that takes a little adjusting to coming from the previous game’s tightly designed “explore, monster arena, repeat” loop, and I can see this being a bit jarring to staunch fans of the original. The levels are sprawling, open affairs more akin to something like a Deus Ex zone, with plenty to explore — and plenty of incentive to wander around even once you’ve completed your mission objective. This means that the pacing is a bit more variable and less controlled by design than in the previous game, though with all that said, there’s still a feeling that you’re moving from encounter to encounter with pressure-free time to explore in between, so that’s good.

There’s also a new hub area with a couple of shops and some questgivers around, giving you a feeling of “coming home” back to base after a successful mission. There are also plenty of sidequests as well as the main story missions, so I get the impression there’s a whole lot to do here.

The game promises 70 weapons, which is more than enough, but each can be further customised by inserting up to three upgrades into them. These have many and varied effects ranging from simply increasing damage to providing elemental affinities to your shots. This is fortunate, as in true Diablo tradition, you’ll often come across Superior and Elite versions of enemies throughout the levels, many of whom have specific strengths and weaknesses with regard to elemental affinities. You can equip up to eight weapons at a time, and there’s nothing stopping you having eight different swords for different purposes if you want to play that way.

Besides the weapons, you can “build” your character through attaching upgrades to your armour and powers, too. These might provide specific buffs to particular types of damage, or increased effectiveness of skills. Pleasingly for the co-op enthusiasts, there’s even a multiplayer-specific equipment slot whose occupants generally buff you and your teammates with an “aura” emanating from your position. These auras can be damage increases, healing over time or defensive in nature, meaning if you really want to get into it, you can build yourself a well-balanced team that minimises its weaknesses — or simply pump as much damage as possible into each other to obliterate enemies in a matter of seconds.

Like the first game, the weapons are solid and satisfying to use, and most of them can be used in dual-wield “akimbo” fashion with the use of an upgrade. They make good noises and they rip through enemies in satisfying fashion; of particular note here are the chainsaws and chainswords, clearly inspired by Warhammer 40,000 — they cut into enemies with such precision it feels like you could carve your name into their guts.

Lo Wang’s wit is present and correct, too, and in the same way as the previous game his jokes occasionally fall flat, and the character he has “riding along with him”, much like in the first game, has some good chemistry with him, making for some amusing bickering. Plus all the usual “wang” jokes are present and correct.

Shadow Warrior 2 is very good indeed. If you’ve been considering picking it up, stop. Buy it. Play it. Love it. Who wanta some Wang?

2458: Who Wanta Some Wang?

0458_001

I finished the recent reboot of Shadow Warrior this evening, and I’m pretty astonished by quite how good that game was.

I really liked the original Shadow Warrior. A contemporary of Duke Nukem 3D and running on the same engine, it followed the mould for first-person shooters of the time by having varied levels, lots of enemies, a formidable difficulty level and a 3D engine that wasn’t quite up to what the designers wanted to do at times. And, of course, a protagonist that spouted silly one liners at every opportunity.

The new Shadow Warrior is an interesting blend of old and new. There’s clearly some old-school level design DNA in there, because the levels are all far from being Call of Duty-style linear corridors. The main route through each level is usually pretty obvious (and if it isn’t, the game makes the next door you should go through glow) but, unusually for a modern shooter, there are plenty of opportunities to explore, leaving the main path of the level to “go and see what’s over there”. The game is packed with secrets of this type and is immensely rewarding for those who like to explore. There are even a number of “retro” secret areas that make use of the low-res textures from the original Shadow Warrior and flat lighting — not only do these provide pleasant fanservice for fans of the original, they also allow you to see immediately how far we’ve come in terms of graphics.

And boy, new Shadow Warrior is one hell of a looker. It’s absolutely gorgeous from start to finish, with beautiful lighting, excellent texture work, interesting level designs and a variety of different environments. Plus it pays homage to the original Shadow Warrior and its other Build-engine contemporaries by setting the majority of its action in “realistic”, relatable locations like city streets and parks, much as Shadow Warrior, Duke Nukem 3D and Blood all did.

The biggest surprise to me was how much I became invested in the story. In the original Shadow Warrior, again like its contemporaries, the story was largely throwaway, delivered mostly through the game’s help text and short ending sequences at the conclusion of each episode. New Shadow Warrior, meanwhile, not only spins some convincing original Japanese-style mythology, it also converts protagonist Lo Wang from the admittedly amusing dirty old man he was in the original to a convincing (and younger) hero who has a genuine journey of development and self-discovery over the course of the narrative. He still spouts cheesy one-liners at every opportunity, but he does so with a certain degree of self-awareness, even giving up halfway through one at one point in the game and choosing instead to just say “fuck your mother” to the demon hordes he is attempting to dispatch at that moment.

Gameplay-wise, new Shadow Warrior is solid, too. Here it diverges a little from old-school Shadow Warrior’s formula in that you don’t encounter a trickle of enemies constantly as you explore the level. Rather, new Shadow Warrior adopts a somewhat Painkiller-esque approach, splitting each level into discrete encounters that sometimes consist of several waves of enemies in succession. They’re monster arenas, basically, but the level design ensures that this structure doesn’t become overly tiresome; it’s pretty rare you’ll just be dumped in a big room with a bunch of monsters. Instead, there will usually be plenty of cover to dodge around, destructible objects with which you can do additional damage and perhaps even some secret hidey-holes where you can get an advantageous position.

New Shadow Warrior’s combat is exemplary for the genre. It doesn’t overburden the player with a ton of possible weapons that all do basically the same thing (hi, Call of Duty) — instead, much like its old-school inspiration, it gradually introduces each weapon to the player one at a time over the course of several levels, until by the end of the game you’re the sort of walking arsenal you were in ’90s shooters, with each and every weapon having a situation in which it is useful. And the weapons feel great, to use; the shotgun is a particular highlight, having not only a satisfyingly loud noise, but the potential to blast pretty much anything into a fine paste.

Also worthy of note is the melee combat, which plays quite a central role for much of the game. First-person melee combat is often a bit crap, consisting of flailing wildly until someone falls over — indeed, the original Shadow Warrior’s swordplay was rather like this. New Shadow Warrior, meanwhile, has a convincing feel of impact to its melee combat. When fighting melee-capable enemies, they’ll block and parry your attacks convincingly, forcing you to outwit them. And with the game’s various skill trees that you can unlock as you progress through the game, a double tap in a direction followed by holding one of the mouse buttons will unleash one of a number of different special attacks ranging from a simple powerful sword thrust to magic-like abilities that can control crowds, heal you, send out shockwaves or protect you from damage.

The reason the “monster arena” structure works is that it gives you time to appreciate the game’s wonderful scenery and excellent level design in between fights. If the action was relentless, you wouldn’t have much of an opportunity to do this, and developer Flying Wild Hog clearly knows that they’ve made a very pretty game. Not only that, but keeping the action to predictable “spikes” allows the player to take their time over combing the level for secrets without worrying about being attacked and potentially losing a ton of progress.

On the whole, I’m really impressed with new Shadow Warrior. It’s one of the very best single-player first-person shooters (perhaps I should say first-person action game, due to the strong focus on melee combat) I’ve played recently — possibly one of the best I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing. And in a world where the bigger budget FPS titles are increasingly bland and dull, Shadow Warrior is a breath of fresh air.