Shadow Warrior 3

While waiting for Atomic Heart to gets its inevitable first post-release patches before starting it, I played through a couple of other titles on the PC game pass. The first one was Shadow Warrior 3, a first person shooter which was released a year ago. It's the third game in the series ever since it was rebooted in 2013, Flying Wild Hog as the developer. (The original Shadow Warrior was released in 1997.)

A short but sweet first person shooter

I haven't played the 2013 Shadow Warrior or Shadow Warrior 2 -- I suppose they just haven't seemed interesting enough to me. I do however have both of them thanks to freebies and I might play through them now at some point. I have also watched quite a bit of the whole reboot series being played so I did have a pretty good idea what I was getting into even when starting from the third game.

One thing I knew was that Jason Liebrecht had been replaced by Mike Moh as the protagonist's voice actor. The reason for that I'd guess is Liebrecht not being of Asian descent while the character is. Devolver Digital as the game's publisher would no longer allow such an outrageous thing to happen in the year of our lord 2022. Anyway, from what I recall from watching the first two games, I liked Liebrecht better than Moh in Lo Wang's role.

Lo Wang also looks a bit different from before, having stopped shaving his hair, although I can't remember if the first two games ever even had third person/cinematic cutscenes. The cutscenes in this one are quite frequent actually, probably to hide loading screens.

Writing seemed similar at least, filled with juvenile humor. The jokes largely didn't work on me but at least it wasn't boring. I did chuckle once when Lo Wang continued Orochi Zilla's proverb:

"The older the tree, the deeper the roots"

"ThE oLdEr tHe aSshoLe, ThE LoUDer tHE tOoTs"

Lo Wang has fallen on hard times after releasing some ancient dragon that is now obliterating the world. Orochi Zilla, an old enemy of Lo's, gets him to pull himself back together and start fixing things. Along the way they meet Hoji and the witch Motoko, both whom I presume to be returning characters.

I remember the second game being criticized for introducing random loot. Many players did not like that and maybe that's why the feature is gone in this third game. Or maybe the developer just wanted to make a shorter game this time: Flying Wild Hog put out three titles last year. That to me feels a lot because I don't think they're that large of a Polish studio.

Less sweaty Doom

Flying Wild Hog were for sure very inspired by Doom Eternal when making Shadow Warrior 3. The gameplay in every way reminded me of it with maybe Lo's katana being unique to this one. Platforming in also felt a lot less out of place than in the darker Doom. And gun choices are less restricted: unlike in Doom Eternal, enemies aren't as particular to which weapon you are using against them. You don't have to worry when you run out of one gun's ammo -- just switch to another one. I liked that a lot.

In general, I found Shadow Warrior 3 a fun experience. On average, players seem to finish the game in just over 5 hours, which makes it a pretty short one. For my more completionist playstyle, it lasted over 7 hours. I didn't bother getting a true 100% clear: I missed a handful of upgrade points hidden around the levels. I did complete almost all the many weapon challenges but two of the exploding barrel related one just weren't happening for me.

My playthrough's duration was also increased because of me having to redo the long fight before the final boss a few times. Falling off the edge normally respawns you back on solid ground with some health loss but apparently the process doesn't always work as intended. Whole two of my tries ended with me getting a respawn point that just kept dropping me back into the abyss.

Shadow Warrior 3's visuals are delightfully colorful, although with everything being so vibrant, distinguishing stuff from environments was sometimes difficult. Music is great too. It has a lot of Asian classical instruments mixed with sort of modern electronic music and an occasional metal combat track. And by Asian I mean Chinese and Japanese (I think). It's in fact a particular detail of interest in the series how it clearly mixes Japanese and Chinese things. I recall reading that being a theme in the original 1997 game already but I wonder if it was on purpose or unintentionally: developers not knowing the differences between the cultures. The reboot series has continued with the theme, as is apparent.

(The screenshots are in some curious resolution: I played it on my laptop during a trip and I guess the true displayed resolution wasn't 1080p even though I thought I had set it at that in the options.)

Edited 2023-06-08: Fixed a few typos.