Shadow Warrior 2
Developer: Flying Wild Hog
Publisher: Devolver Digital
Platform: PC (Reviewed), PlayStation 4, Xbox One
Release Date: October 13, 2016
Players: Single and Online Multiplayer
MSRP: $39.99

This is a review coupled with a video review. You can watch the video review above, or read a transcript of the video below.

Shadow Warrior 2 baffles me with the mere notion of its existence. Imagine if you will, a reboot of a hardcore classic, maze-wandering, gore splattering, 90s FPS doing really well, and the announcement of a sequel not long after. Now imagine the sequel has taken the Borderlands route. Yeah…a little weird, isn’t it? Can Shadow Warrior 2 still hold its weight, though?

You’re Lo Wang, a foul mouthed hilariously snarky Asian man once again weighed down by someone else inside his brain, and you’re working for a silly cast of characters to get that problem removed. Talking to anyone in this game is just a joy, as Lo Wang and his friend are extremely well written.

Their back and forth banter, along with the other, less banterful characters, is basically the only reason the game’s story exists, and is really the main reason I want to keep playing – some of it is legitimately laugh out loud hilarious. They could have done to tone down Lo Wang talking to himself mid-fight though. Otherwise the story is barely there: some nonsense about a sci-fi corporation doing evil things, giant monsters and demons, callbacks to the first game, you get the idea.

Thankfully, the actual shooting is surprisingly satisfying for what you’d expect from the usual genre examples. Every weapon is built uniquely and for the most part every weapon hits hard and satisfyingly.

You have multiple magic spells you unlock quickly that can even the fight against a ton of individual enemies, and you’ll be needing the healing power they give you right off the bat a lot.

Combine this with the sword system with a few special melee moves that you can pull off in a pinch, and it becomes extremely cathartic to just shoot and stab things, at least in the first few hours. Unfortunately you will eventually have to move up weapons just for the damage output increase. Like the bow you’re holding? Too bad, there’s an outright better one.

Enemy design more or less follows genre stereotypes though – there are different areas with their own enemies you see over and over again. The typical “can’t be affected by magic, weak to this, strong to this” formula is in full force, but it isn’t as horrible in this game since it encourages weapon switching, and the game’s UI gives mutliple options from shortcuts to weapon wheel.

Bullet sponges are along for the ride too unfortunately. You’ll have fun pinging the big boss monster of the level 30 times in the face with your strongest weapon to bring it down. At least enemies go flying, get cut into pieces, and get knocked back in a significant way most of the time.

Individual quests in this game are isolated to their own maps; you load into one and start killing everything in sight. The maps are procedurally generated every time, but a low variety of map parts make level very repetitive – even story quests are procedurally generated.

Resources are everywhere and your path is always marked by a straight line on your minimap, making this as barebones an FPS RPG that you can get. It doesn’t do anything to really advance the idea, or reglorify the roots of the original Shadow Warrior outside of some not really well hidden secrets to find.

You eventually devolve into a pattern of “go to point A, kill enemy B, loot chests C-R, go to point S.” Maps start fading into one another and you’ll start feeling sick of the map design entirely eventually. The other downside is that the actual maps outside of this are really empty – huge swaths might have nothing in them at all.

There’s online co-op for up to four people; while I wasn’t able to try it for this review, it’s worth pointing out that in order to matchmake in multiplayer, you have to start the game at the difficulty of how many players you want, which is horrific when trying to play by yourself.

Enemies, as you might expect, deal out more damage and take less, which makes everything feel about as bullet spongey as Borderlands 2 co-op, but you have multiplayer exclusive upgrades to play with to try and even the odds a little.

The RPG side of things is about as simple as it gets – insert skill points into number-based skills and slowly get more proficient in what you’re doing. You get a ton of skills early on, but no unique abilities unlock by leveling them, just by finding them.

You also earn skill points really quickly, somewhere in the realm of five per mission, so it’s not bogged down too heavily in “should I take this or that”. Simple, but functional, although not as engaging as I would hope.

Playing with your weapons gets a lot more tricky though – since you have to juggle three gems in at least eight individual weapons, eventually you’re going to trip over yourself multiple times trying to figure out if you have better gems for any of your weapons, as they’re all just stuck in a massive list.

They’re all number buffs for the most part – every now and again you’ll be able to make a standalone turret, or dual wield, but this is the exception – so having it being annoying to fiddle with your numbers like this takes away from the actual shooting for way longer than it needs to. Multiply this by the ten or so gems you can put on your person and eventually I found myself going several missions before bothering to process upgrades.

It’s also over quickly – imagine my surprise when I was 5 hours in and saw I’d already completed half the game on the character select screen. There’s no real reason to go for 100% completion – while the hundred or so fortune cookies may be worth keeping an eye out for, the multiple twenty chapter journals and newspapers that drop from enemies like candy from pinatas are just too numerous to want to bother with.

Since there’s no class diversity like in a Borderlands game, I don’t see any reason to go through again – since the weapons aren’t generated and the maps are so similar, it’d just be the same thing.

The PC version gets a thumb and a half up – it runs really well on the latest drivers on my rig (i5 4590, GTX970, 8GB RAM) and looks really good in the process. There’s plenty of options, lots of keybinds and nothing seems to be missing. I did run into a few techincal bugs though – I had to restart a quest more than once due to getting stuck in terrain, and the narration buggered up pretty much every time someone started talking mid-mission.

It’s hard to recommend Shadow Warrior 2 at its current retail price. While the gunplay is cathartically chaotic and the writing is hilarious enough to cover the lack of story, it doesn’t do much of anything worthwhile outside of that.

The grind sets in hard too quickly, only remedied by the fact the game’s fairly short. When the game does get a little cheaper and you can bring a friend along to play, it’ll be a pretty fun way to spend a weekend, but you won’t remember it later.

Shadow Warrior 2 was reviewed on PC using a digital copy provided by Devolver Digital. You can find additional information about Niche Gamer’s review/ethics policy here.