![]() ![]() You can fill your mousewheel and number keys with a full arsenal fairly quickly, but you'll find more and more as you progress. ![]() The problem with the weapons is that there are too many of them. I've been distracted by dismemberment, sorry. If you like gore, Shadow Warrior 2 delivers in spades. They slide apart exactly where a blade or bullets hits them, and carry on fighting with all kinds of holes in them and pieces missing. You can wave it around vaguely using the left mouse button but hold down the right button and you get fine control so you can cut enemies every which way. I mean, it should be the chainsaw, right? That thing has the most hideously, brutally, brilliant control scheme I've ever seen on a bladed weapon in a game. Picking a favourite weapon is almost impossible. I've been forced to retreat in order to reshuffle my upgrade combinations and make a truly killer weapon, and other times I've died and respawned multiple times (there's a punishment for doing so, but it's not particularly harsh) before throwing my hands in the air and admitting I'm going to have to retool my favourite chainsaw. There's an element of that, given that bosses and minibosses alike have specific immunities, resistances and vulnerabilities. ![]() I thought they might make the game too busy, introducing a preparation phase before the slaughter can begin. You can fit three to a weapon and they're recyclable so you can experiment with them without being punished.Ĭustomisable weapons then. They're like Diablo's gems, plugging into items to change or improve their qualities. Some are attached to weapons to change their statistics and others buff your armour or abilities. Most importantly, they drop upgrades in various forms. Almost every chest you open and enemy that you kill drops loads of the stuff, from medikits to cash and bullets. And speaking of Deadpool, the baddies sure do enjoy dressing like him.Īs soon as you start slicing and shooting, you'll see the other big change from the previous game. There's even a button for accelerated falling (there's no fall damage) so you can pull off the kind of hero landing that movie Deadpool made a mockery of. Double jumping is in from the start and the dash/dodge on the shift key can be used in mid-air to propel you in any direction. ![]() You can't fly in Shadow Warrior 2 but you can come pretty damn close. That's in service to the new tricks Wang (and whatever other characters you create for co-op play) has to play with though. This stitching together of parts does tend to lead to large, open spaces, with few tunnels and corridors. A street and its buildings might be slightly longer or have a different junction at the end, or a bridge or cave entrance might be in a different position, or not there at all. There's enough of a core to each area that they all feel crafted, it's the things around that core that are reconfigured every time you visit. You might not even know if you hadn't been told. Oh, and the maps are procedural, to an extent. Some missions are optional and while there is a linear story to follow, you can sometimes choose to visit one area before another. The main difference, initially, is that you have a hub to visit between missions, with a couple of shops to trade in (one for guns, one for melee weapons) and questgivers to natter with. You're still moving through a series of missions, visiting environments that range from demon- and drug-ravaged suburbs to cyberpunk citadels and rabbit-infested forests. The structure creaks occasionally, particularly when there's so much loot in your trousers that it all becomes a little meaningless, but it's such an impressively strange thing to have built that I half-expected the whole thing to topple over and smash to bits. That gamble is to trust that the movement and combat of the first game were strong enough to support a loot-laden first-person ARPG setup. Shadow Warrior 2 isn't an unqualified success but its big gamble pays off handsomely. Part Borderlands, part interactive chainsaw massacre, it throws everything at the wall and hopes there's enough blood to make most of it stick.Īnd stick it does. It was the best of the old and the best of the new.įor their sequel, Flying Wild Hog have kept the fundamentals but built an entirely different game atop them. The 2013 reboot succeeded because it took the principles of a nineties FPS and dragged them kicking and bleeding into the twenty-first century, adding superb melee combat controls, a well thought-out upgrade system, but sticking with linear levels packed with easter eggs and secrets. Shadow Warrior 2 could have gone horribly wrong. ![]()
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