Shadowgrounds

The Good
"Hey boss, how about if we do a top-down shooter?" Imagine someone saying that in a meeting at one of the big companies. Well, thankfully there are crazy people who want to do something like that and all by themselves. Shadowgrounds is the first commercial game for everyone in the development team and pulling off something like this is quite a feat.

The game was released as a budget release even though the production values are every bit as good as any full-value retail game. It also shows that sometimes it's a good idea to look back instead of trying to make the next great first person shooter (which looks like everyone else's FPS).

So, here you are. The maintenance guy. And the electricity goes out. Your always as lovely boss tells you to go fix them. It doesn't take an Einstein to figure out there is something funny going on, especially after you find your co-workers chopped to bits. And then the fun begins. The entire planet seems to be crawling with ugly, badly-behaving aliens.

Thankfully there is a plethora of cool guns to use in you extermination job. And not only that, you can modify the weapons in some cool ways. My favourite is the cluster bomb modification to the grenade launcher which creates not one but five explosions. That ranks high in my "mwahahaa!" list. Another contender for the list is the modification that combines four rockets from the rocket launcher into one to create one massive explosion. Wish those FPS's had such great effects. Die you alien scumbag! Mwahahaa!

The guns are simply cool looking and sounding. Who wouldn't want to mow down a bunch of ugly aliens with a minigun? Or torch them with the flame thrower (which can be modified so that it spills the fuel in the ground to be ignited later - great way of settting traps)? Or just shot to pieces with the very powerful shotgun (with an extra mod that shoots all the rounds in the chamber at once)? And they sound so good that you want to use them just for that.

Just as well, because there sure is a lot to shoot. The symphony of destruction is nicely accompanied by a very good sound-track. The amount of music is actually quite amazing considering the background. There are stuff that are only heard in certain small areas, such as a disco.

A special mention goes to the way the game treats light and darkness. You really need your flashlight, but naturally it doesn't run forever. The flashlight can also be used to scare away some monsters and there are some that are only visible when lit with the flashlight. It really can be scary when all you see is what your flashlight shows. Especially outside, with wind howling and rain falling on you. You find yourself turning around frantically trying to make sure no-one sneaks up on you.

With the highest quality settings the game looks very good, unfortunately you need quite a machine to be able to use them. My machine, despite a decent video card, couldn't handle it.

Apparently there is also an FPS mode available, but I didn't try to find it as it requires some tweaking.

The Bad
Surprisingly, this game is bit of a resource hog. I had to drop quality settings quite low and the game still got very choppy in bigger battles. I actually quit playing in the second to last level because of this. Just as well, as I thought that level was very boring. The developers unfortuntaly thought at that point that making a game harder involves putting the player in a small room with lots of enemies. Repeatedly. But dying because you get about one frame per second was the last straw. On the other hand, there was plenty to play up to this point. It was also a shame that I had to drop the resolution to 800*600 early in the game. It looks a lot lamer than the higher resolution versions.

And I have to say that despite being a sci-fi fan I'm growing a bit tired of all these aliens. Maybe it's the only setting that allows shooting this many enemies, but it still isn't very inspiring. The game could also have used outdoor areas more, on balance indroor areas dominate maybe a bit too much.

Occasionally the game also misses a keypress. This tends to happen more reqularily as the action heats up. Very nasty in a tight firefight. I wouldn't mind more intelligent monsters either, but I guess it's not very genre-like.

The Bottom Line
Good fun for little money. Getting back to the roots of shooters but with modern technology. A top-down shooter hasn't been this much fun since the 80's.