Shadow Warrior - A Double Review

When you’re taking the week off work because everyone’s out for Christmas, you need to kill time somehow. Now I’ve already covered how movies here aren’t the best option as something to do, but luckily my Steam account is fully unlocked here, and I can play however many dumb old shooters that I want (although Disco Elysium and the South Park games still have Australian censorship, even if using a VPN). And there’s two in particular that I just played through for the first time, recommended by YouTuber Civvie 11 – Shadow Warrior from 1997 and the rebooted Shadow Warrior from 2013, both following the adventures of jobbing Chinese mercenary Lo Wang as he battles through thousands of demons.

While these games share the same name, basic idea and one-liners, they are very different games in terms of design, movement and combat, and are fascinating to compare. One is a primitive low-budget shooter made by industry veterans, the other a big-budget PS4-era gorefest by relatively green Polish developers. Which one comes out on top and how do these two differ? Well, let’s get some Wang and get into it.

Shadow Warrior (1997)

The original Shadow Warrior comes to us from the once mighty 3D Realms, who put out several of the best classic shooters ever made such as Duke Nukem 3D. Much like Duke Nukem, Shadow Warrior is made on Ken Silverman’s Build Engine, an advanced 2.5D engine that allows for rooms to exist over other rooms and underwater sections, but is still like the Doom engine in that enemies are flat sprites and is essentially pranking your computer into rendering a 2D space as 3D. It was behind the times even in 1997, the year after Quake revolutionised 3D graphics and three years after System Shock’s immersive design innovations, but Build allows for fast movement, lots of jumping and some real satisfying explosions and gore, which Shadow Warrior provides aplenty over its 8-hour runtime.

The game’s design is fairly simple boomer-shooter stuff – walk through a level that somewhat resembles a real place like a temple or an oil rig, encounter groups of enemies organically in the level and mow them down quickly or get blown to shreds by Build Engine dickishness. During this time, you’re also looking for keys, secret weapons behind walls which are triggered by switches or gongs, or random anime girls scattered throughout secrets who Lo Wang will hit on and then immediately get shot by. Yeah, it’s a throwback to 70’s Golden Harvest/John Carpenter exploitation cinema, so get ready for a lot of absurd violence and offensive-if-hilarious dialogue in a bad Chinese accent (I may love classic Lo Wang’s one-liners, but I can’t ignore that voice actor John Galt is so white he’s named after the protagonist from Atlas Shrugged).

"Hey, you good rooking sairor babe!" - Actual quote

Compared to other Build Engine games like Duke Nukem or Blood, the main improvement of Shadow Warrior is the excellent weapon and enemy variety and how the two balance out. Blood has better feeling weapons but enemies who are either hilariously ineffectual or can kill you from across a country in two hits, while Duke has a lot of tanky enemies who you need to slowly whittle away at. Shadow Warrior, meanwhile, is a lot more balanced – enemies die quick, so do you, here’s all the awesome weapons with individual effects and benefits. Go nuts.

You’ve got your Uzis for crowds of smaller enemies, a great riot gun for closer enemies, missiles for enemies who need to be gibbed to stay down, a slow railgun to take out enemies at range, and even a demon head you can steal from gibbed bodies and use like a long-range flamethrower. There’s also a fantastic grenade launcher, which on Hard difficulty (or “Who Wants Wang” as the game puts it, which I played through the entirety of) is invaluable for shooting around corners and hearing hordes of enemies explode through the nearest wall. Awesome.

Oh, and if you look for secrets, you can pick up nuclear missiles to use like a screen-clearer in an arcade game – shoot it into a big room and run away while enemies scream in pain behind you. If you’ve got no enemies, pull out your katana and slice them in half. If you don’t like the katana, you can punch so fast that you can actually stun-lock the final boss and die from punching stone walls too hard (which I’m annoyed there wasn’t an achievement for in the Steam version).

Superpunching mutant gorillas

The combat is definitely the best aspect of Shadow Warrior, as the levels themselves vary wildly in quality. Some of them are just overlong key hunts where the objectives are unclear, sometimes the doors you need to go through are unmarked, and the Sky Temple level can get stuffed for its stupid traps made worse by the Build Engine’s jank. And get ready to die a lot and reload because of enemies you can't see, an experience which is not for you if you don’t like quick saving every five minutes (admittedly better than Blood which needs you to load every five seconds.)

There are also a few gameplay innovations that Shadow Warrior throws in that haven’t aged particularly well. For one, it’s the first game to have throwable sticky bombs, which you need 3 of to kill the enemies who need to be blown up (and often doesn’t even manage that) when just one missile will do. And unlike Halo’s Covenant, the enemies don’t flail and scream in terror when they get stuck with one of your bombs, so they’re much less satisfying to use overall. Also from before Halo came along are the first vehicle sections in a first-person shooter, which control clunkily and move much slower than you do, so get out of the car and shoot the enemies yourself, you lazy bastard.

Still, even with these annoyances, Shadow Warrior is a fast-paced and fun shooter that holds up decently for being one of the last 2.5D games before Quake, Half-Life and Unreal would make 3D ubiquitous. The version available on Steam runs beautifully and didn’t crash once, and even comes with the two expansion packs Twin Dragon and Wanton Destruction if you really love playing Shadow Warrior. It’s a good time, and I’d give it a 7.5/10.

"How's that for kung-fu fighting, you chickenshit!"

Of course, a few years after Shadow Warrior came out, we would enter the console-shooter era, a stop-and-start, poorly paced cavalcade of Call of Duty’s, Gears of War’s and games that restricted your movement as much as possible to show off all the pretty lighting and all-American gusto. Innovation in shooters ground to a halt, and everyone started seeing them as the low point, the unimaginative cancer of the gaming industry that was falling behind and giving it a bad image.

But then in 2013, two companies released shooters for consoles and PCs that tried to challenge the idea that shooters had to be Call of Duty, both of which would lead to the retro shooter renaissance currently being seen online. One of those companies was Interceptor, a virtual studio of assorted Americans who remade cult classic Rise of the Triad and would eventually split off to create the publisher of Dusk, Amid Evil and UltraKill. And the other was Wild Flying Hog, a newly formed Polish studio who made…

Shadow Warrior (2013)

Edgy 2010's Wang

Another tidbit of shooter history is the subgenre that came to prominence between the boomer-shooters and the console-shooters – the arena shooter. These were games like Serious Sam and, more relevantly, Painkiller, where you walk into a big square, the gates are locked, and lots of enemies pour in as you circle-strafe around them blasting away with your guns. Painkiller is my main point of reference, not just because it’s one of my favourite shooters out there, but also because it was developed by another Polish studio called People Can Fly, which had several employees cross over to Shadow Warrior’s team, and it feels very similar.

Painkiller's worst level.

Shadow Warrior isn’t as good as Painkiller, unfortunately, because it’s impeded by a lot of strange decisions that get in the way of blasting through enemies. Primarily, it’s the fact that enemies take so many bullets to go down that every combat section feels just far, far too long. Taking down a mini boss will take almost your entire inventory of ammo and leave you flailing around with the katana for every other enemy, and even the most basic demon requires two blasts from the game’s shotgun from 2 centimetres away. It’s saying something that my playtime on Steam for the reboot was 17 hours, while classic Shadow Warrior took me only 8 even with more levels.

For a game based on a 2.5D 90’s shooter, it’s surprisingly 2-dimensional, with so little verticality in the levels that you can die of fall damage after dropping five feet. You don’t even have to aim up most of the time, because there’s few flying enemies and most of the enemy variety in the reboot are just “shoot-at-it-until-it-dies” types that stand still or run at you. You could probably re-create Shadow Warrior 2013 in the ancient Wolfenstein engine, which would be as vertical and get rid of the goddamn eyesore bLOOM. Damn, remember when bloom was in every PS3/Xbox game ever and it was atrociously ugly? Well guess what, Wild Flying Hog likes it, and you can’t disable it without going into the console and causing the game to disable achievements because it thinks you’re cheating, even when it makes my computer chug like a broken steam train. Wonderful!

MY EYES

Putting aside the level design and the spongy enemies, the combat itself isn’t bad, but it’s weighed down by some truly unnecessary gameplay mechanics. For some reason, there’s a stamina mechanic, where you need to dash to evade sprinting enemies or otherwise trudge around the battlefield like you’re walking through mud. No fast circle strafing or bunny hopping for you (I’m not even sure there’s a point in the game where the jump or crouch buttons are even used, and when I jumped into a two-foot pond for secret-hunting I died of fall damage).

There’s also an upgrade system where you need to upgrade your abilities with karma/XP, which is either found in amounts too low to be useful in secrets or awarded in combat by a system that I never figured out – performing excellently gave me 1 star, performing terribly and flailing about gave me 4 stars. Can’t just have your abilities from the start and increase the difficulty with new enemies, you gotta unlock the ability to sprint more than 5 metres!

And the weapon upgrading…Jesus. You also find money in tiny amounts from secrets and cabinets and slowly build up enough to purchase upgrades to make weapons not useless. Your base pistol and machine gun are fine if inaccurate without upgrades, but the other weapons are not ideal until you’ve trawled through two levels worth of cabinets to buy one upgrade. Your crossbow is insanely slow and less accurate than the pistol…until you spend $4000 on the sticky bombs upgrade which makes it the best weapon in the game. Your shotgun does random damage and Lo Wang loads it like he’s arranging porcelain figures on a shelf…until you halve the reload time and get him to fire both barrels at once, which makes it an effective death dealer. Your flamethrower is almost completely pointless…until you buy the firebomb upgrade, which does what it says on the tin. And the rocket launcher is the worst of all time. Don’t even look at it. Screw it.

When you don’t have enough money for the useful powerup. 😡😡

Why are these mechanics even here? My assumption is that to separate the game from comparisons to Painkiller, they decided to add these elements in to be more reminiscent of console-shooters like Bulletstorm and the latest version of Wolfenstein, which had both of these mechanics. But by going to the effort of programming and designing these systems, they probably spent months of work on ideas that only impede the gameplay rather than help it. You could have spent that time on making more than 8 enemies to fight, or tuning down the spongy enemies, or putting secrets in place where I need to jump and crouch to find them. But no, we need our token upgrade system, even though there isn’t much point to it and Painkiller gave you the cool secondary fires and bunny hopping from the get-go.

One aspect of the combat that fits in very well, however, is the new mechanics surrounding the katana. In the original, it was just a melee weapon for slicing up enemies when you’re out of ammo, but the reboot transforms it into a proper combat tool to use both at range and close-up. You unlock a variety of chi-powers in the plot that can be used in conjunction with the sword – a ranged slice, a ball to lift enemies helplessly in the air, an auto-heal which you’ll need against the flipping Berserker enemies, a powerful stab – and they require a series of button presses you need to memorise and deploy against the right enemy. These powers don’t have an ammo/mana supply and can be used infinitely, but are limited by the button combos for time, allowing a certain balance to be had. And as the levels are ridiculously stingy with ammo, you are going to rely on the katana a lot. It’s a nice weapon that perfectly shows off the surprisingly great gore effects of Shadow Warrior 2013, and probably the standout of the combat, even if the enemies take forever to kill with it.

The only other improvement over the original I’d note is the story, in that there actually is one. Lo Wang teams up with a demon named Hoji to mow down Hoji’s other family members and wake up Hoji’s comatose sister who, in true anime fashion, Hoji banged in the past. Their relationship is like a basic buddy-cop movie with a couple of good one-liners and an excuse to go through lots of caverns with pretty lights and bLOOM, but it’s better than the napkin scrawl that the original had. It’s still got plot holes and inconsistent characterisation, but it is actually there. Not much of a boast, but it’s something.

In fact, that could sum up Shadow Warrior 2013 pretty well – it’s not much, but it’s something. It and Rise of the Triad 2013 were the right steps towards shooters becoming fast, responsive and over-the-top like they were in the good old days, and I suppose we can thank them for that. As a game though, Shadow Warrior's just too full of dumb decisions and too long and arduous to be much more than a very efficient time-killer. I’d give it a 5.5/10.

Although finding out how few have beaten the game on Hard pleases me. And about 80% of my deaths were from accidentally sprinting on stairs, flying off the top and dying of fall damage, so dying so little to the combat makes me feel even better.

I picked up both of these in the Steam Winter Sale for under $4 each, so if you want to wait for the next seasonal sale, go for it or buy them for $25 each without discounts. Shadow Warrior 1997 is a good recommend, Shadow Warrior 2013 not so much. And go watch Civvie 11’s YouTube Channel if you also like reading about old shooters. He’s got plenty more Wang jokes there.