Significant betrayals and deceptions are passed over in a manner of moments, character relationships are grown and changed with throwaway lines of dialogue, and the cast of the game is so small that the plot starts to feel like a minor group-chat argument between four horrible, irritating people rather than an adventure to save the world.Īside from the core combat experience, everything in Shadow Warrior 3 feels tangential most of all Polish developer Flying Wild Hog’s setting and cultural borrowings from Japanese folklore and mythology, which are given all the thematic weight of decorations for a child’s birthday party. Of course, Shadow Warrior 3 is enthusiastically irreverent to the bone, so the stakes never feel terribly meaningful, yet strangely, the game’s tone is constantly hot-footing between caring too much and too little about its characters and world. What you get with Shadow Warrior 3 is a linear rush across the game’s ‘neo-feudal Japan’ setting, listening to Lo Wang karaoke-ing and quipping his way through largely same-y combat encounters. I never thought I would describe an apocalyptic mission to slay a world-ending dragon as ‘quaint’, but here we are. However, while Shadow Warrior 3 seeks to efficiently trim the series down to a state as razor sharp as a katana, it instead ends up feeling like a slice of life out of a more interesting, expansive game. Paring itself down from the RPG-lite frills of Shadow Warrior 2, a game replete with transferable weapon power-ups, enemy health bars and optional missions, Shadow Warrior 3 emerges from its diligent note-taking during the recent ‘ Doomassiance’ by directly attempting to ape the structure, gameplay loop and progression systems present in both 2016’s Doom and 2020’s Doom Eternal.
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