Visceral combat, quirky quips, and sometimes unbearable moments make up the twisted and heavy-action-focused Shadow Warrior 3. Flying Wild Hog and Devolver Digital are bringing us their second sequel to the revived classic franchise and putting a stamp of offbeat humor into the mix. With features such as first-person shooting, melee combat, and a free-running movement system, you would think this title would be a no-brainer. However, that's exactly the issue at hand. For someone experiencing the franchise for the first time, this entry felt like an auto-pilot violent fever dream with some hiccups along the way.

Story

Shadow Warrior 3 has a pretty simplistic story. There's just enough here to give you a who and why to make sense of all the constant demon-slaying throughout the entire campaign. You play as Lo-Wang, a ninja assassin mercenary turned good guy. The game opens up with Lo-Wang explaining the story of how he almost saved the world from an ancient dragon that he is somehow responsible for waking up. This ancient dragon has essentially brought upon the apocalypse on the world and all of humanity is at stake. It is now up to Lo-Wang and his cronies to stop the ancient dragon and save the world, one dismembered demon at a time.

As I mentioned earlier, there isn't much here to keep your attention on the story. I found myself not caring about any of these characters and they were all present just as an excuse to keep the flow of gameplay moving forward. The campaign is littered with pop culture references and tongue-in-cheek humor that fails to land the majority of the time. Lo-Wang has the personality of an extremely immature man-child, which I am sure is exactly what the devs were going for. However, this doesn't make it much of an enjoyable experience as it is frustrating and annoying. Oddly enough, the game even points out the fact that it has terrible jokes. Clearly, nothing is to be taken seriously at all with this title, so why even try with a story?

Gameplay

Thankfully the gameplay in Shadow Warrior 3 is good. The revamped classic has everything you would expect from a modernized arena shooter. Pickups are scattered throughout the levels, respawning after a cooldown, allowing you to memorize health and ammo pickups when in a tight spot. The game has very few moments that are not closed-off areas that bring upon wave after wave of demons. This may or may not be a negative aspect but it definitely makes the game feel a bit repetitive by the time you reach the end of Lo-Wang’s adventure.

The weapon selection is decent and brings about the typical offerings you would expect from this genre with a couple of unique ones that are fun to exploit. One weapon shoots out shurikens and chops enemies to bits, allowing you to shoot and continue to move throughout the level, giving it a “shoot and forget” strategy. The katana causes the most havoc, dismembering demons and gushing blood that nearly takes up most of your field of view. Unfortunately, using the katana doesn't feel as good as it should. Sure, it’s supposed to be a hack and slash type of weapon, but they don't feel impactful.

The game also allows you to upgrade your character skills and weapons with upgrade skill points that are randomly scattered throughout the game. I wasn't too fond of this mechanic since the skill points are mostly gained by just finding them in the level. The levels are very linear so the skill points are essentially unlocked the more you advance through the game as opposed to actual skill. That being said, you can also earn skill points by completing various challenges the game offers, which usually included “killing a certain amount of enemies a specific way.”

Free running and grappling hooks are used heavily throughout the campaign and are used solely to allow Lo-Wang to traverse the arena levels in a quick fashion. Typical gameplay consists of nonstop movement and shooting until all enemies are defeated, then you are free to leave the designated area.

Lo-Wang also has the ability to perform an instant kill on nearly all enemies in the game once you charge up the meter. Performing these instant kill animations is cool at first but get old pretty quick after the 50th time seeing it during your adventure. These instant kills also allow Lo-Wang to utilize the demons’ special abilities, whether that be freezing enemies, giant drills, or a bladed eyeball that flys around the arena chopping up other demons to bits. There are more than a handful of these abilities and they are essential at times to gain control of the arena, especially when you feel overwhelmed.

Glitches and performance drops were experienced throughout my experience with the game. Although they are not constant, they do exist and some of them are just annoying. I had run into an instant death glitch on multiple sections of the game that threw me completely off guard, not knowing how or why I died. One of the many closed-off arena sections of the game had waves of enemies spawning to attack. There was a section of a wall that caused me to instantly die as soon as I double jumped onto it. I couldn't figure out that this was the reason for my death until maybe my tenth attempt at the level. It was such an odd glitch, I ended up just staying away from that side of the level just in case the game bugged out again. 

Another time there was an instant death glitch was during a chase section in the game. You have to traverse and slide from one ledge to another and at the peak of the chase, you end up free-falling from a very high altitude. But before free-falling, you have to wall-run off an object and then jump. The glitch would cause me to die if I decided to double jump instead of a regular jump.

Performance drops were few and far between but they do exist on the PS4 version of the game, especially when transitioning from gameplay to cutscenes and vice versa. I do not know if the PC version of the game suffers from the same issues as the console version. Overall, these glitches and performance drop definitely water down the experience.

Audio and Visuals

There has been much criticism over the game's new voice actor for Lo-Wang, Mike Moh. Since I have not played the previous entries in the series, I thought the voice acting was actually pretty good. Although the writing doesn't always click for me throughout the game, I did appreciate the voice work for the characters.

The cutscenes in the game would not always sync up to the audio, there is almost always a delay in the audio and video specifically during cutscenes. This occurs right at the beginning of the game when Lo-Wang is explaining the story. I had high hopes that this was an isolated issue but I was terribly wrong. This issue persists nearly for every cutscene. The audio and video are not synced correctly. This was very hard to overlook and just made the game feel a bit rushed and unpolished.

The graphics are good, the world of Shadow Warrior 3 is filled with vibrant colors and detailed demons. No complaints here about the art style, it is aesthetically pleasing and fits the theme of the game. Textures do pop in at various times, mostly after you load back up from a recent death in a large-scale area. This did not occur much, if at all, in the smaller scale levels.

Replayability

Shadow Warrior 3 comes in multiple difficulty levels. That's the extent of the replayability, other than attempting to max out the skills and weapon upgrades in the game. Really not much here for players once they complete the campaign.

What It Could Have Done Better

Just a reminder, this is my first entry into the Shadow Warrior series and I didn’t know what to expect. That being said I had a lot of gripes with this game but there is definitely some fun to be had here. The story is extremely weak and I feel the game would have probably done better without one. Characters make comments that seem to contradict their personality type and seem to just make comments, just because. Nothing about the story or characters made me give a damn about what the hell was going on.

I don't mind off-beat humor but constant 8-hour exposure to it is a bit much. I can handle, and even appreciate, my fair share of immature humor but this was just over the top. I'm sorry to say, I may have laughed once throughout my entire playthrough. The sad part is that the game realizes it’s not funny and knows it's trying to be funny, but that ultimately does not make it funny. It just makes you wonder why even include this? It didn't click for me.

More importantly, the gameplay is good fun. However, the game got overly repetitive by the time you reach the end and it would have been great to throw a few curve balls during the journey to mix things up a bit. But unfortunately, the game had the same flow throughout the entire campaign, short traversal area and then fight waves of enemies in a small arena level. Oh, and the occasional boss fight. Shadow Warrior 3 could seriously benefit from an additional game mode to keep players' attention past the credit screen. Otherwise, there's not much else to be said.

Verdict

Shadow Warrior 3 offers stupid fun and delivers an okay arena shooter experience that is dampened by repetitive gameplay, technical issues, and a story not worth remembering. The plot leaves much to be desired and almost feels like the game would have done better without one altogether. With the lack of much replayability and the obvious technical issues with the game, these are key factors that can determine if a title is “good” or just “okay.”

Shadow Warrior 3 is available now on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC via Steam.