![]() Player upgrades are equally streamlined, improving your single chi-push ability, resilience, the frequency of resource spawns, and your ability to inflict environmental damage. The Basilisk swiftly became my favourite – a high-powered, charge-up rail gun that can eventually pierce through multiple enemies and inflict a freezing blast on contact. The Sidekicks (twin submachine guns) do minimal damage, but shocking rounds allow you to stun enemies before switching to more powerful weapons or moving in close with your elementally-infused Dragontail katana. The Riot Gun (think shotgun) can become a fully-automatic, reload-free death-dealer – but is only useful at close range. There are only six weapons, but each can be upgraded three times with increasingly powerful and specialised abilities. Everything feels streamlined or deliberate – such as the limited ammunition reserves – to keep your focus on the minute-to-minute action and never allow you to fall back on overpowered weapons or character upgrades that remove the need for skill. Thanks to Shadow Warrior 3’s irreverent tone, style, and brevity, I found the formulaic succession of artificial combat arenas – with clear traversal routes, respawning ammunition and health pick-ups, and variants of exploding barrels – more tolerable than those in Doom Eternal. If Shadow Warrior 2 looked to Diablo and Borderlands for inspiration, Shadow Warrior 3 has been inspired by Doom Eternal’s frenetic, bloody arena battles and streamlined character upgrades. To be fair, most of my nit-picks about the narrative only came to mind after the credits rolled as the gameplay is fun – if derivative. I guess you could argue who cares about the story so long as you get to travel to cool places and kill bizarre demons. The game does build up to a satisfying showdown but ends on a low note, with little indication of what’s next for the survivors or where the IP could go next. I’m assuming it was a deliberate choice to avoid alienating new players, but you’ll have to dig into unlocked lore entries to fill the gap between Shadow Warrior 3 and its predecessors. Despite the number of cutscenes and plenty of in-game dialogue, the narrative feels shallow and only serves to direct Wang between cool locations. What follows is a 5-6-ish hour adventure as Wang and his “allies” – including a resurrected Hoji that has ditched all character growth seen in the first game – try, fail, and try again to defeat the dragon. Zilla remerges with a plan to use Hoji’s mask to infuse a weapon that could destroy the dragon and, in the absence of any better ideas, Lo Wang sets off with him. A prologue that gets you up to speed on the new gameplay loop recounts Wang’s failed attempts to defeat the dragon, leaving him disillusioned and his mojo lost. The surviving ancients – gone Zilla City and its human inhabitants – gone the Wang Cave – reduced to a wreck perched on top of a cliff. Turns out this giant beast is the egg-laying mother of all the demons you battled in the prior games and swiftly sets about destroying what’s left of the world (now the second apocalypse Wang has triggered). If Shadow Warrior 2’s story managed to hold your attention, you might remember a giant dragon emerging from a portal between worlds and attacking Lo Wang. The result is a satisfying but short-lived sequel. With Shadow Warrior 3, they’ve produced a brisk single-player-only experience, doubled down on the narrative elements, and gone for a razer-sharp focus on arena-style battles interspersed with free-running platforming segments. As a consequence, level design and narrative felt like an afterthought. The sequel went for a cooperative Diablo/Borderlands-ish approach, with a focus on tearing through hordes of enemies in procedurally generated environments (sort-of), with a large selection of firearms to modify. The first – and still my favourite – is a somewhat dated and overlong corridor-FPS, with a surprising amount of narrative depth, levels packed with secrets, and gunplay that revolves around kiting enemies and picking the right gun for the right foe. The setting, characters, and tone remain consistent between each entry but the gameplay either evolves or devolves – depending on your tastes. I can think of very few trilogies that feel as inconsistent as Flying wild Hog’s take on Shadow Warrior. ![]()
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