Nine years on from Flying Wild Hog Studios’ first reboot of the Shadow Warrior franchise, it’s all change with the third series entry. Protagonist Lo Wang’s voice is different, the gameplay itself has evolved and crucially – from a Digital Foundry perspective, at least – the engine technology powering the experience has moved on.
The impressive Road Hog engine takes a backseat this time to Unreal Engine 4 – a controversial decision that doesn’t quite pay off. Meanwhile, the lack of native current-gen versions of the game is a genuine disappointment – owners of new consoles essentially get accelerated versions of the last-gen game, missing key visual features.
The changes to gameplay are worth focusing on to begin with: Shadow Warrior’s 2013 reboot was a fast-paced classic FPS, filled with health drops and secret locations – but with a surprisingly well crafted story and characters you could really care about. Shadow Warrior 2 was a different beast: the base shooting and swordplay improved and the Road Hog engine delivered impressive visuals, but level design and engagement in most of the game took a step back in quality, owing to levels built around tile-based randomisation, Diablo-style. Shadow Warrior 2 may have looked gorgeous, but the base gameplay was marred by turning most of the objectives into something you might find in Borderlands.
Shadow Warrior 3 switches things up still further: shooting and swordplay are radically simplified (two attacks and no parry), with fewer weapons but more focus on those weapons. Perhaps this is to make it work better on a controller with less inputs, but at the same time, these changes also work hand-in-hand with the game’s entirely different combat beat, which seems now heavily inspired by the recent Doom games. Essentially, a level is an A to B path where you engage in first person platforming with very light combat in a corridor style where you have very distinct paths that you can traverse through very quickly. These paths then end up in typically circular battle arenas, where enemies spawn in waves and progress is achieved by vanquishing them all. Ultimately, we’re looking at tunnel-like movement from arena to arena, but the design is great and the combat itself is very well designed. The focus on fewer weapons works as they’re all satisfying to use, while the enemy design is also worthy of praise.