This is compensated effectively for by being able to propel yourself around the battlefield with powerful rocket farts and your special sword attacks can be a pretty effective last word, the word being 'Argle- spurt, spurt, thump.' It's just weird how you have to pull them off with Street Fighter combos. There's a bit of a focus on melee sword attacks which has the usual issues that close combat in first person has, best demonstrated by strapping a GoPro to the head of an excited dog in a room of unshredded tissue paper and trying to follow what's going on. So Shadow Warrior is a first-person shooter that got recommended to me as 'like Painkiller, but with a plot', which isn't a great recommendation because as pretty much everything with the Painkiller brand on it beyond the first one demonstrates, trying for any plot more complex than 'you man, kill demons, grunt grunt, fire hot' more often than not is the metaphorical handful of sand in the fleshlight, but Shadow Warrior does indeed boast fast-paced, arena horde fights that would be reminiscent of Painkiller if Painkiller maybe had more than one tenth of the monster variety. By the very end, it's making out like he's finally become a noble warrior hero, but no transformation was in evidence around the end of the previous episode but one in which he blew up a ship while his allies were still on it for basically no reason, although it's refreshing to be on the other side of a stock totally illogical betrayal for once.

See, the recurring issue I had with the plot is that the game seems to think Wang is undergoing a character arc, and speaking as the guy who spent eight hours inhabiting his skull, I'd beg to differ. Somewhere along the way, this turns into 'kill his master' and eventually, 'kill the lords of Demon Town as well', and I'm not entirely sure where the change has happened. However, the world is soon hit by an invasion of genocidal demons and it becomes clear that there are darker forces than the shady boss man with an interest in the niceties of magic sword ownership rights, and Wang sets out to finish the job and get the sword to his master. But Wang doesn't have a name that means cock for nothing and so 'acquire' turns into 'steal, kill everyone, burn house down'. He's sent by a shady boss-type man to acquire a magic sword from some other gang leader-type. Our protagonist, Lo Wang, is remodeled as a quippy egotistical bungling bad-ass with a slightly less silly accent and so brings to mind the comedy Asian bloke from The Hangover movies being cast to understudy Bruce Campbell in Army of Darkness. The only thing I remember clearly from it is a naked anime girl doing a big farty dump. So the remake takes quite a few liberties with the plot of the original I'm not entirely certain the original had a plot. I ain't no Tumblr tot getting my pronouns in a twist over cultural appropriation, but when a bloke with a comedy Engrish accent runs around with a samurai sword, screaming about how his name means 'penis', you gotta wonder how it would fly at a summit of the United Nations. But in this case, also with a spicy hint of casual racism. All I have to do now is sit here wearing these hype-deflecting blinkers for about two more weeks and distract myself by attaching a honey badger to my bollocks.īut the union says that the honey badger has to have a lunch break every eight hours, so while it's away, I might as well pass the time with a game that's a couple of years old now but has been on my catch-ups list for precisely such a moment as this: Shadow Warrior, not to be confused with Shadow Man, A Shadow's Tale, Shadows of the Damned, Shadow of the Beast or Showaddywaddy, nor indeed to be confused with the Shadow Warrior that it is a remake of - a late 90's Build shooter from the Duke Nukem mold and you know what that means: violence, endemic key-hunting and a questionable attitude towards women. This week, Zero Punctuation reviews Shadow Warrior.Įverything's ready for Dark Souls III! I've erected a new wall to bang my head against and refreshed my stash of chewing bricks.

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