Shadow Warrior

aka: Lo Wang is Shadow Warrior, Ninja Master, SW, Shadow Warrior 3D, Shadow Warrior Classic
Moby ID: 387
DOS Specs
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Description official descriptions

Lo Wang has been working as a Shadow Warrior (a bodyguard and mercenary of sorts) for the powerful Zilla Corporation for years. But when he discovered the evil Zilla's plan to summon monsters from other dimensions and conquer the world, he left in disgust. Realizing that Lo Wang might jeopardize his plans, Zilla sends his assassins after him.

Shadow Warrior is a first-person shooter similar in style and gameplay to Duke Nukem 3D. The game set in a generic "Asialand", which looks like China and Japan conflated together. It features deliberately immature and politically incorrect humor, as well as a protagonist who delivers regular one-liners, commenting upon the situation at hand. Much of the humor is derived from over-the-top, stereotypical portrayals of Asian culture (e.g. scantily clad young women drawn in Japanese anime style).

The player has to complete several levels, fighting enemies and occasionally solving puzzles on the way. Though the game primarily focuses on exploration and combat, puzzle-solving plays a larger role than in most other contemporary shooters. There are also a few sequences that allow the player to drive vehicles, some of which have mounted weapons. Like Duke Nukem 3D, the game's environments are interactive, allowing the player to manipulate or destroy scenery and many objects, often revealing secret areas. On a technical side, the game introduces climbable ladders, true room-over-room situations, and voxels (instead of sprites) for weapons and inventory items.

Enemies include evil ninjas with various weapons, "coolies" which carry a crate of dynamite and blow themselves up when near the player character, female assassins with crossbows, and many more. To combat them, Lo Wang can use a variety of weapons and items. Weapons include: Lo Wang's fists, a katana, shuriken, a riot gun, an Uzi (two of which can be equipped and used at a time), a rocket launcher firing heat-seeking or nuclear missile, a grenade launcher, sticky bombs, a railgun, and even some enemy body parts. Many of these weapons have a secondary firing mode. Lo Wang can also find and use gadgets such as caltrops to leave in the enemies' way, or gas bombs to choke foes who happen to be near it.

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Credits (DOS version)

29 People (19 developers, 10 thanks) · View all

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 69% (based on 34 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.9 out of 5 (based on 93 ratings with 5 reviews)

Wang Bang! A surprisingly fun game despite outdated technology.

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.

DOS · by Trixter (8952) · 1999

Lo Wang is not the best FPS character around these days

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

DOS · by Katakis | ă‚«ă‚żă‚­ă‚ą (43092) · 2002

Good game, but the boat had already sailed

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.

DOS · by Maw (832) · 2007

[ View all 5 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
Intro & Cutscenes? Unicorn Lynx (181780) May 9, 2010

Trivia

Censored

In Great Britain this game was partially censored: they took out the ninja star weapon (shuriken) and reduced the gore levels.

Cut content

In the Master's Dojo, there is a picture of four Hentai girls (naked anime women) but only three of them can be found throughout the level. The graphics of the missing girl are still in the data files where she can be seen plunging a sword into her belly (presumably at the feet of her dead master).

Development history

Shadow Warrior was in development way before Duke Nukem 3D hit the store shelves, but as evidenced by pre-Duke ads it originally was a much more "serious" game. Duke's success as a politically-incorrect, off-the-wall shooter prompted a re-focusing of the game's content. So Lo Wang was created (originally the main character was an avenging angel kind of character), the story and levels were rewritten, and the weapons were modified (originally you had one Uzi, and threw only one shuriken, plus your arsenal included a crossbow, a lightning-throwing gauntlet, and an assortment of spells.

German index

On August 30, 1997, Shadow Warrior was put on the infamous German index by the BPjS. For more information about what this means and to see a list of games sharing the same fate, take a look here: BPjS/BPjM indexed games.

Graphics engine

Shadow Warrior uses the same Build engine as Duke Nukem 3D, but has some additional enhancements over that version, like transparent water, colored lighting, and reflective floors.

Humor

As an example of the game's subversive humour, the main character's name is Lo Wang. Wang is actually a slang term meaning penis. Consider the possibilities when Lo Wang says to a bunch of geishas "so, you want to wash Wang or you want to watch Wang wash Wang?" Also at one point in the game it is mentioned that Lo Wang has a brother, Hung Lo, continuing the same style of humor.

Novels

There were two novels based on Shadow Warrior. You Only Die Twice by Ryan Hughes, and For Dead Eyes Only by Dean Wesley Smith. Both were published by Pocket Books.

References

In the Seppuku Station level, head to the snack area (enter into the station via the door that has to be opened with the gold key, go down the luggage chute directly across from the door, and head into the conveyor on the left immediately exiting the first chute). Look at the little fliers all over the column in the room, and you'll see one of Lina Inverse of Slayers.

References to other games

In one level, Lo Wang comes across a female character chained to the wall that bears a striking resemblance to Lara Croft of the Tomb Raider series. He utters, "I guess she raid her last tomb!"* In the Bath House stage (level 12), you're treated to a nice display of explosions just before the level starts. Lo Wang makes a comment when they end about how it looks like something Duke Nukem would do.

Source code

On April 1, 2005, 3D Realms released the full source code, based on the 1.2 version, under a restrictive GPL license. The data files can be used for entertainment and education purposes, but they remain licensed/copyrighted and are not to be redistributed. There is no official support, but the company has opened a new dev forum on their website.

Voxels

Shadow Warrior has a feature that wasn't present in any of the other Build games, it supports voxels. Voxels are kind of like 3D pixels (i.e., cubes), and 3D objects constructed out of voxels don't have the ugly, blocky look that polygons give them. Ken Silverman finished a rudimentary voxel engine just in time for Shadow Warrior, and it was added to the game. You can enable voxels in the options menu, and it makes all game objects 3D at the expense of a lot of memory.

Wanton Destruction add-on

Soon after the release of the game, an add-on pack by the name of Wanton Destruction was announced, but ultimately cancelled. In September 2005, Anthony Campiti, from the Sunstorm company, which was developing the expansion, found the code back and passed it on to 3D Realms. Owners of the original v1.2 registered version can now download it for free. It contains 12 new missions and 4 multiplayer maps. The more in depth story about this can be read here.

Despite their note, it is possible to play the add-on with JonoF's Win32/Linux port without having the original DOS version installed. Either run the setup, and search for a WT.GRP file on your hard drive (it'll be in a temp folder), or use an archive program to extract the file from the setup EXE without running it. Nevertheless, 3D Realms offered a token of good faith by reducing the price of the original game to $10.

Information also contributed by Andy Voss, ClydeFrog, Maw, Satoshi Kunsai, Sciere, Tomer Gabel, Xoleras, and Zovni

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Related Sites +

  • Crap Shoot
    A humorous review on PC Gamer
  • IGCD Internet Game Cars Database
    Game page on IGCD, a database that tries to archive vehicles found in video games.
  • JonoF's Shadow Warrior Port
    A port using Shadow Warrior's source code that adds native Windows and Linux port using a Build engine port, OpenGL rendering support and True-colour textures support.
  • RTCM
    The largest Build Game resource website!
  • Shadow Warrior
    official game page at the 3D Realms website from late 1996, preserved by the Wayback Machine
  • Shadow Warrior - Coming from 3D Realms
    game development page at the Apogee/3D Realms website, snapshot preserved by the Wayback Machine
  • Shadow Warrior Central
    Keeping Shadow Warrior Alive Since 1999! A Shadow Warrior resource website.
  • Wang's Dojo
    One of the most comprehensive Shadow Warrior sites available. Has many Total Conversions (TC's), files, patches, demos, screenshots, tricks, cheats, latest info about the "Shadow Warrior Scene" and tons more!

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  • MobyGames ID: 387
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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Trixter.

Windows added by lights out party. Macintosh added by Scaryfun. iPad, iPhone added by me3D31337.

Additional contributors: Andy Voss, Kate Jones, Xantheous, Dae, Alaka, Maw, lights out party, formercontrib, Patrick Bregger, MrFlibble, Victor Vance, Rob G.

Game added November 5, 1999. Last modified March 15, 2024.