Shadow Warrior

The Good
I'll be honest: When I first picked this up, I expected it to be a lame knockoff of Duke Nukem 3D. I was also skeptical of how it would look and play, given that it was based on 4-year-old engine technology (the Build engine). I was very surprised to find that it is just as fun as Duke Nukem 3D and completely stands on its own as a really fun game to play.

The Build engine, being a raycaster, has several tricks built into it that have you occaisionally scratching your head and asking yourself, "How did they do that with a raycaster?" Sections of the floor and wall can move, objects can be moved, and even some sprites can be represented as 3-D using the raycasting technique as a crude voxel engine. Also, mirrored floors, movable sectors, transparent water and sprites, colored lighting, and other tricks have been encorporated into Shadow Warrior to good effect.

The "Lo Wang Speak", while some might find extremely stereotypical and offensive, is just great. Sometimes you just want to bask in its political incorrectness and laugh yourself silly.

At first I was bored with the weapons--katana, shurikens, fists, yawn--but after weilding twin Uzis to the sound of "Be proud, mister Woo", a four-barrel shotgun hearing "I like big guns!", and a rail gun proclaiming "Time to get Erased!", I started to take notice. By the time I was summoning zombie versions of myself with a pulsating heart, and using the head of my recently-killed enemy as a fire-spewing weapon, I was totally hooked.

When they say "Interactive Environment", they're not kidding. If you can't kill it, you can use it or smash it. You can pilot a forklift into a wall to break it down, pilot a boat across water, and other fun things. There are so many hidden weapons (and inside jokes/references) that it's fun to just wander around and try everything.

The Bad
Being a raycasting engine, I kept wanting to really look up and down, but due to the limitations of raycasting, it was clear that my "looking up and down" was really "extending my head higher and lower as if attached to a periscope". It's cheezy, and is the only "extra" that I wish they'd left out of the list of enhancements to the engine, since it's not really used anywhere effectively.

Some of the jumping-from-platform-to-platform areas are annoying (as is all jumping-from-platform-to-platform areas).

The Bottom Line
If anything was ever a Wang Bang, this is it. Even if you're entrenched in a best-seller like Half-Life or a beautiful world like Unreal, you should give Shadow Warrior a shot, because they simply don't have the attitude of Lo Wang.

The Good
With the surprise success of their classic FPS game Duke Nukem 3D, Apogee/3D Realms decided to do what most game developers do when they hit it big: do the same thing all over again. And thus we have Shadow Warrior; a Duke Nukem clone set in the far east.

The plot makes it immediately obvious we're dealing with a samurai movie spoof. You're Lo Wang, an ass-kicking "Shadow Warrior" who rents himself out as a bodyguard to the highest bidder. But you're not entirely happy with your latest employer's agenda (hint: world domination) and you resign from his service. But you're so powerful he can't possibly let you be employed by someone who might fight against him, so he tries to kill you using an army of ronin and mutant ninjas. This is a springboard for ~20 levels of fighting, escaping traps, and uttering cheesy one-liners.

If you're expecting this to be a "stealth ninja" game involving sneaking around, evading security, and bringing silent death to your foes, stay at home. Like Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior is a 200 pound sledgehammer of wall-to-wall action. Using an upgraded version of the Build engine (it supports translucency, fog, and 3D models) Shadow Warrior is a straight-up, run and gun shooter set in a wacky and outlandish environment you don't often see in video games.

First, the good stuff. Shadow Warrior is very refined and polished and in terms of production quality is probably the best of the Build engine games. Level design is outstanding, with lots of secrets, side-routes, etc that serve functions both in single-player and multiplayer mode. The puzzles are a lot smarter and harder, and instead of simply flipping switches you'll have to do stuff like use a joystick to manipulate a toy car on the other side of the level (which you can see from a camera feed) so it pushes a key underneath a door for you to pick up. There's some really clever stuff here that pushes the limits of what the Build engine can do.

The weapons are great. In the ninja tradition you have a katana (which literally cuts enemies in half) shurikens (they stick in the walls and you can re-use them) and more high-powered fare like twin uzis, riot guns, missile launchers, etc and at the upper end of the chart you have really crazy stuff like a disembodied heart that summons a zombified clone of yourself. Like in Blood, most of your weapons have alternate firing modes allowing for a lot of versatility.

During the game's release hype much was made of the fact that the game lets you control vehicles. You can drive cars and forklifts, and even control a tank at one point. The areas where you can do this are limited and it's more of a gimmick than anything, but it's still an amazingly cool gimmick.

Shadow Warrior is much more user-friendly than most other FPS games of the time. When underwater you have a colored bar showing you how much air you have left (why did no-one think of this before?) and the bosses display a health bar as well.

Other than that the game is basically the same as Duke Nukem 3D, although the oriental theme provides a new spin on this old horse. Just about every "gun-fu" action movie and martial arts cliche is spoofed here, and the game remains just as humor-driven as its predecessor was. As a character, Lo Wang isn't half the man Duke Nukem was, although he has some funny one-liners.

As can be expected from 3DRealms the game was well supported even though it didn't sell well. They released a 3Dfx patch, and even made the game's source public domain. And on the 3DR website you can download a canceled mission pack for the game free of charge.

The Bad
The word "obsolete" best describes Shadow Warrior, and this has nothing to do with the fact that it's a 2.5D game released at the height of the 3D revolution. It aspires to be nothing but a Duke Nukem 3D clone, and frankly the experience isn't as fun the second time around. Graphically, Shadow Warrior is extremely dated, with pixely sprites and cheesy explosion/fire effects that look like they belong in a Doom-era game. And the game shipped without TCP/IP support, essentially robbing the game of the strong selling point of its multiplayer.In 3DR's defence they took the time to dress everything up shiny and new, and all the original thinking had already been done in Duke Nukem 3D.

More specific problems include incredibly lame and cheesy boss fights (including a giant sumo wrestler whose farts damage you...wow, it must have taken them ages to think that one up) and various contrivances such as non-resettable puzzles (basically, if you screw up you often have to reload).

The Bottom Line
The last of the "big three" Build engine games (the other two being Duke Nukem 3D and Blood), Shadow Warrior was pretty much the last 2.5D game worth buying. It's a formula game but it's worth getting for historical significance. Arguably it was also 3DR's last major FPS game until Prey in 2006, assuming the phrase "when it's done" still means something to people here.

The Good
The build engine in SW has been updated and there are a lot more of possibilities to interact with everything surrounding you (you can drive vehicles like tanks "!", use remote controls and lots of funny stuff to do) there is also an interesting option were you can toggle 2D objects to 3D objects, not very good looking but it's a detail. There are also lots of humor, you will hear through all the game lots of quotes by Lo-Wang in a pure Duke-ish style (You no mess with Lo Wang!)

The Bad
If you just only want action some of the puzzles in the game might frustrate and bore you, there are not only key-finding puzzles, so some more a bit more complicated... Sometimes i found myself entering a room and getting killed at the instant by a bunch of monsters, the monsters are real though sometimes.

The Bottom Line
An interesting game that has not received very good reviews, maybe because it's more of the same? or because those reviewers haven't played it enough to discover the little jewels this game hides? Anyway it's real funny and challenging. Cowabunga!

The Good
Shadow Warrior is the second game by 3D Realms that uses the Duke Nukem 3D Engine. Besides the interface looking good, it basically has the same layout as in Duke Nukem 3D: Health and Armor on the left side, Ammo and Inventory on the right, and a list of weapons in the middle. The only difference is that there is a compass above the information.

In Shadow Warrior, you play Lo Wang, a trained specialist in martial arts. Wang used to work at a corporation known as Zilla Enterprises. Unfortunately, due to crime and corruption, Wang made the mistake of leaving the corporation, and as a result, Zilla Enterprises has built an army of monsters that will take over Japan, with some of them going after Wang. Some of the enemies include ninjas, coolie, coolie ghosts, rippers, and hornets.

This is where “Lo Wang Speak” comes in. When you waste enemies, more often than not, he’ll start to say something like “Oh Look! You coming apart”, “you’re not half the man you used to be”, or “Oh, you little tiny dick”. Other parts of the game you hear “Lo Wang Speak” is where he interacts with NPCs (Non-Playing Characters), and you’ll meet the first batch of them in level three, and look like anime chicks. When Wang attempts to strike up a conversation with them by saying such lines as “Lo Wang soap you good”, “You want to wash Wang, or do you want to watch Wang wash Wang?”, or “Hello? What died down here”, all they do is say “piss off” or “you jerk”, and shoot you. Then there’s the old woman in a later level who tempts Wang to pash her, by saying “Give me a little kiss Lo Wang” and giggling. Another bit of interactivity is where you get to drive tanks or boats equipped with their own machine guns. This way you can shoot a load of enemies at once.

You’ll also have the chance to solve some puzzles in order to get past an obstacle in your way. In level one, for example, you have to play with one of the toy cars carrying a silver key, and you have to get it into an open gap, so that Wang can grab the key off its back. Speaking of keys, in each level, you must collect different keys of different colors (red, bronze, gold, silver, yellow, or green) that correspond to the color on one of the doors in the level.

When he says at the start “You no mess with Lo Wang”, he is not joking. He will start his quest in his own apartment somewhere in downtown Japan, and go on a bloody rampage through subways, construction sites, temples, bathhouses, prisons, boats, and airport terminals. Besides his sword, Wang starts out with a set of shurikens, which he can throw to slice enemies. Other weapons include the fist, riot gun, Uzi, grenade launcher, missile launcher, and heat seeker. When Wang decides to stand and do nothing for a while, a fly will buzz around him, causing Wang to catch him with chopsticks.

The Bad
Shadow Warrior comes with two episodes. The shareware episode “Enter the Wang” only has four levels, while the episode designed for the full version “Code of Honor” contains eighteen levels. I found that some of the levels are difficult to pass, that I had to use the no clipping cheat.

The Bottom Line
This game is good, but Duke Nukem 3D is better. ** ½

The Good
First, let me say what was good about this game. The graphics were pretty good, better than Duke Nukem 3D's but on a par with Blood. The jokes in in Shadow Warrior were funny, and having the ability to drive various vehicles was also a good innovation, but could not make up for the game's defects.

The Bad
Where do I start? The weapon selection in this game was absolutely horrid. The twin Uzi's were and heat-seeking missle launcher were good weapons, but the rest were bland and unoriginal. Shadow Warrior's item selection was confusing at best; I could never figure out which did what, so I rarely used them. In that area alone the games is inferior to Duke Nukem 3D. The enemies were not very interesting, unlike other games, and were difficult to defeat at times, due to the fact they could damage you quickly. Also another aspect of the game I did not like was the fact that there was to much platform jumping. At several points in the game, this irritated me so much I almost quit.

The Bottom Line
I would have to be paid to play this game. I would recommend staying away from it.