Shadow Warrior 3 Review – Slash and Dance with Guns

The year 2013 surprised the world with a reveal of the classic Shadow Warrior game, that original was released in 1997 as a Doom clone. However, it was quite different, thanks to its unique Ninja-based weaponry and over-the-top humor. Years later the game series got picked up by Devolver Digital and Flying Wild Hog, and they released Shadow Warrior 2, with much success. Now they’re back at it again with a follow-up, Shadow Warrior 3. Does that kind of action still hold up today? Let’s find out as we look at Shadow Warrior 3.   

Game Name: Shadow Warrior 3
Platform(s): PC (reviewed), PS4, Xbox One
Publisher(s): Devolver Digital
Developer(s): Flying Wild Hog
Release Date: March 1st, 2022
Price: $49.99

Shadow Warrior 3 takes place directly where Shadow Warrior 2 left off, with Lo Wang accidentally summoning a massive dragon that proceeds to take out most of the surrounding area. Realizing the error of his ways, he agrees to join forces with his main rival Zilla to help take out this dragon and protect the world from destruction. The story itself is a bit of a change from what I remember from the other two Shadow Warrior games.

Rather than continuously focusing on a big bad that then changes to a new big bad, the entirety of this game focuses on trying to beat the dragon in various ways based on who is helping you. This game’s story is very short. It took me 6 hours to beat this story, and that was with a number of retries on areas due to dying. I am sure you could beat this game in only 4 hours if you really wanted to. Playing the game is great, but the bad thing is there isn’t a lot of content to go through in this game. Once you beat the story, you can replay the story again with your enhanced character, however, you won’t be able to have the guns you unlocked at the end of the game. 

Jedi Spider-man 

This game is so fluid in movement. You start with just a pistol and a katana to shoot and slice demons to shreds. Along the way, you get access to a larger variety of weapons ranging from a shotgun to a shuriken shooter. The name of the game is to keep moving. You will have to do first-person platforming through linear levels until you get to an arena in the level. Then you will be ambushed by demons. The farther you get into the game, the more demons there are to kill and the difficulty increases with each new demon that shows up.

You can double jump, dash in the air or use your chi to push enemies away from you. You can’t be still or you will be surrounded by enemies wanting to grab your throat and tear you apart. You get access to a grappling hook really early on that will help you maneuver throughout the stages. In the arena parts of the levels, you can use the grappling hook to pull yourself over to other sides of the arena through the rings or grapple onto enemies directly and kick them off ledges as you then continue to slice and dice your way to kill them all.

I call this playing as a Jedi Spider-man since you can use your grappling hook to keep your maneuverability up as well as your katana will be used heavily in this game. Something really handy in this game is how you kill your enemies will determine what they drop to aid you. If you shoot up a storm of demons, they will drop health for you. If you slice a bunch of demons into pieces, they will drop ammo. As you look at what resource you are low on, it will help you kill demons more efficiently as you get health and ammo. You can jump on vines and wall run as you stay away from the deadly range of your foes. This part is going to be the part I am most excited to see people play. I can imagine an insane speedrun or a lot of epic clipped kills of demons. There might even be challenges of how many demons you can push over the edge. 

You can find orbs around the levels if you look around. They aren’t too hard to find, and depending on the orb you find you can unlock certain things. There are two orbs to find around the levels, Character Orbs, and Weapon orbs. Character orbs you can invest into your character for health, elemental damage effects, or even regeneration effects. Weapon orbs can be invested into any of your unlocked weapons for more damage, larger ammo capacity, or even multiple bullets at a time. Overall this game is a blast to play. The levels go by quickly as you are just enjoying your time killing demons and moving from one area to the next. 

Killing Demons? Yes! But How Does it Look?

This game is very nice to look at, but it isn’t anything too special. Fabrics and wrinkles come in clean, and the way the characters look is extremely epic. You have a giant dragon that comes out pretty clean, and the blood and guts are as you expect. That said, the cinematics can be quite jarring. They seem janky and the movement in the cutscenes doesn’t feel nearly as smooth as the actual gameplay feels. It takes you out of the experience; it is lucky there isn’t a whole lot of cinematics in this game. They come and go pretty quickly and then put you back into the shoes of Lo Wang killing demons.

I was running this game on high settings due to having a beefy build with an RTX 3060 12 GB VRAM video card. Gameplay ran fine at a solid 60fps. The cinematics however would stutter at the beginning and then throw the whole audio sync out of wack. You would watch Lo Wang mouth move before the voiced lines started playing. Thankfully, a patch that came to steam fixed a lot of the audio sync issues. There are still times when the cinematic stutters in the beginning, but it smooths out pretty early on and makes it much easier to watch. 

BANG BANG BANG

The sound direction on this was phenomenal. The soundtrack has some very fitting music with the apocalyptical Japanese towns. Each gun has a different sound for shooting and recoil. Demons all have unique sounds to them as well. Sounds of how they scream to die, or when they are grunting at trying to force themselves to try and kill you. The music also made it super easy to get into the zone for killing demons with it being upbeat but also very lighthearted. The voice actors knock it out of the park in this new adventure and they all play off each other extremely well. Mike Loh does a fantastic job of being Lo Wang. 

 

What is the Verdict? 

Shadow Warrior 3 is a fantastic bite-sized game that has a lot to offer in its small amount of playtime. It would be nice if it had a larger story or more content in the game once it is finished, but overall I enjoyed my time with the game. I would say if you are trying to get the most value of time per dollar spent, hold off till there is a sale. This is a must-play video game for those who love action games or fast-paced platformer-type games. 

Shadow Warrior 3 releases on March 1st, 2022, on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.

Review Disclosure Statement: Shadow Warrior 3 was provided to us by Devolver Digital for review purposes. For more information on how we review video games and other media/technology, please go review our Review Guideline/Scoring Policy for more info.

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