Shadow Warrior 3 Review – Humorous Repetition

Reviewed on: Xbox One
Also on: PlayStation 4, PC
Publisher: Devolver Digital
Developer: Flying Wild Hog
Rating: Mature

Within Shadow Warrior 3’s opening minutes, protagonist Lo Wang stands in dirtied underwear, screaming profanities at a massive dragon outside his window. This comedic introduction sets the stage for a lighthearted and breezy approach to storytelling and combat – both satisfying in over-the-top ways while coming up a little short in scope and variety.

No matter what is happening on screen, developer Flying Wild Hog almost always goes for the cheap laugh. Zany pop culture references, a near endless stream of lines like “I think I just peed a little” when barely making a jump, and jokes about human body parts are delivered like they are going out of style. Some hit in comedic ways, but most don’t, yet there’s a charm to these swings and misses that work in Shadow Warrior 3’s favor – it’s almost funnier when the humor is terrible.

After putting some clothes on and hatching a plan to use dark magic to kill the dragon, Wang shows us he’s no slouch on the battlefield. Given his move set and overly violent approach to killing, he looks like the understudy of Doom’s Slayer – a strange and mouthy version of him who is a blast to control. He doesn’t stop moving once combat begins, lighting up demons of all sizes with a rattle of machine guns, a flurry of swords, and even using their own weapons against them. If Wang pauses for a brief second, the enemy will likely kill him quickly. Thankfully, the vertically-designed arenas work in his favor, with traversal lines and escape routes liberally littered throughout to create separation from the swarms. With a small yet balanced selection of armaments, chaining together kills can be a lot of fun, especially when adding in the nicely designed environmental maneuvers of double jumping, wall running, grappling, and dashing. Some arenas even do the fighting for you, such as spinning sawblade traps that can be activated from afar to chop up foes. All told, the combat flow feels nice and makes you feel powerful.

This run-and-gun action is not for the faint of heart, however: Demons pop like zits to the shotgun, intestines soar through the air like party streamers after sword slashes, and every explosion turns an enemy into a bloody mess. When Wang racks up enough carnage, he can direct a finishing move to one enemy. Just like Doom, the action pauses for a gory fatality, like ripping off a giant’s arm and using it as a hammer or tearing off someone’s head and squishing it to juice. The carnage is a bit much, and seeing the identical death sequences frequently grows tiring, but some moments bring about humor – more of that is desperately needed to change things up.

Click here to view embedded media

 

After an hour of play, Wang says, “Chopping demons to pieces is the one thing I can’t ever get tired of,” and it’s not meant to be sarcastic, but comes across that way given just how frequently the same conflicts erupt. Flying Wild Hog tries to inject variety into the battles with new enemy types in each zone, but relies too heavily on the same grunts, which pose little threat and end up stealing excitement from almost every battle.

Platforming sequences usually occur after most encounters, but rarely last more than a few seconds and don’t do much for the player, other than give you a chance to catch your breath before the next brawl. This is a shame as the motions are quite good, yet the action rarely shows how exciting they can be. The best diversions are a harrowing rooftop ascent, and a set-piece moment in which Wang chases a tanuki through a cavern – a moment lasting long enough to give the platforming meaning in a goofy way.

Click here to watch embedded media

When moving between areas, the player is encouraged to keep an eye out for hidden upgrades that can enhance Wang’s weapons and base attributes in significant ways (like headshots triggering explosions), but a good number of these items are found on the critical path or are earned as rewards for completing challenges. Sadly, the game doesn’t let you revisit past levels to collect perks you may have missed.

Shadow Warrior 3 rushes along with zaniness and gore dispensed in loads, and that combo is oddly satisfying. It feels different, doesn’t take itself too seriously, and is wildly aggressive in how much it wants to make you laugh. I appreciate this approach and had a good time with this game, despite how often it hits the same gameplay and humor notes. When most major releases these days are 100-hour juggernauts, Shadow Warrior 3’s five-hour playthrough is a nice alternative and is worth a look. Just be prepared to groan frequently and be oddly amused by those groans.

Score: 7.5

About Game Informer's review system

Purchase

Read More

Lost Ark Review - Dungeons And Demons

Reviewed on: PC
Publisher: Amazon Games
Developer: Smilegate
Rating: Mature

Smilegate and Tripod Studio’s newly localized Action/RPG Lost Ark initially launched in South Korea several years ago, and thanks to its western publisher Amazon Games, English territories are now getting their hands on it. While Lost Ark may look and play like Diablo or Path of Exile, it’s an MMO through and through, featuring engaging group content like dungeons, raids, and world bosses within a vast, explorable globe. My time with Lost Ark has had some ups and downs, but the more I stuck with it, the more I wanted to spend time in its world.

The open hours of Lost Ark are sometimes dull but necessary, setting the stage for what’s to come. After creating my character, I was whisked away to search for a mythical artifact known as an Ark, which stands at the center of a rather milquetoast fantasy narrative. Much of the leveling experience follows a military campaign to help a prince win back his land and claim his rightful crown as king while battling relentless demonic forces. Despite much of the plot not keeping my attention, it has some great moments. Important characters, such as the conflicted half-demon priest Arden and the magnanimous Prince Thirain, have compelling arcs that occasionally snapped me out of my boredom.

The world eventually opens up, allowing for free travel by ship to other continents that dabble in much more diverse and interesting aesthetics and themes. The critical path took me to places like an island with a Honey I Shrunk the Kids-like adventure featuring diminutive Mokokos where I was miniaturized smaller than a ladybug, a martial arts tournament in a Japanese-inspired land, and a high-tech continent full of futuristic robotics and mechs. Once I set sail for these unknown lands, the world of Lost Ark lost any sense of a cohesive identity, but after the opening hours I was ready for a drastic change in scenery, and the variety presented brings a lot of life to the experience. Because of this I find myself adoring the diverse late-game content much more than I care about why one country is living with cyberpunk body mods while others are living in the dark ages. I’m constantly looking forward to the surprises that await on islands I haven’t yet visited.

As an isometric game, Lost Ark’s world lacks some of the environmental splendor of other MMOs, though it shines in set-piece moments where we get a new angle on the world. The most spectacular points in the narrative or dungeons are spiced up and highlighted with camera shots that present a greater sense of the surrounding world and environments. The world becomes a much more interesting place when cutscenes pan and spin the camera to show off the ruins I am exploring or the hundreds of fiends storming a contested castle. These moments go a long way to making it feel like there’s much more to Arkesia – that this is a fleshed-out world that’s lived in and not just a primarily flat dungeonesque landscape.

I’m astonished by the level of customization available for each of Lost Ark’s 15 classes, thanks to the Tripod system. This gives each of your class skills three tiers of perks to choose from that can greatly modify those abilities. Some perks modify smaller aspects of a skill such as its attack speed or resource consumption; others apply elemental bonuses and can fundamentally change larger characteristics of the attack or spell. With my Soulfist character, I’ve set up my skill bar to focus on capturing enemies near me in stunning AOE attacks and finishing them with massive meteoric palm strikes or shredding them down with machinegun energy blasts. Skill points and the Tripod perks can be changed at any time for no cost, which left me happily experimenting for hours on cool combos that left hordes of demons exploding into a satisfying gory mess.

Click here to view embedded media

 

Much of the game’s content can be completed alone, including dungeons, which I appreciate as a mostly solo MMO player. Though, it is a lot more fun to delve into a dungeon with a group of other adventurers. Players can form guilds and group up with friends on a given server, but unfortunately, leveling with friends can be a nuisance. When playing with a group, you’re often forced to separate when moved into a story instance, causing the team to have to re-invite and regroup when the infringing narrative content finishes. Having other players roaming the world makes Arkesia feel much more alive and dynamic, especially when I came across and joined a disparate group of players joining forces to take down a goliath missile-loaded walking tank or a brutish boss in the middle of nowhere in the desert. The map is loaded with these types of encounters, and they’re a joy to find every time.

Lost Ark has no shortage of activities to complete and items to collect, much of which I loved to seek out. World bosses, dungeons, raids, PvP, naval exploration, seeking out the 1000+ Mokoko seeds, card collecting, item crafting, material farming, befriending NPCs, and so much more can fill hours and hours. Just about every one of these tasks has a series of rewards which makes doing nearly everything worthwhile. There’s even an entire island stronghold to build out and customize that feels like an entire game in and of itself. I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface with my collection of items, which thankfully in many cases carries over progress to the other characters I’ve created on the server. Although any regional achievements that are tracked in the Adventurer’s Tome will have to be completed on each character.

Because Lost Ark is free-to-play, there are plenty of monetized items and cosmetics in the game’s shop. While I didn’t spot anything egregiously powerful, I want to note that there are items that can have a very minor effect on aspects of the game, like item drop rates. A Crystalline Aura buff acts as a pseudo subscription that can be purchased in 30-day intervals and grants bonuses like free teleportation costs and reduced time for projects in the Stronghold. It’s hard not to see this translating to character power in some way, but benefits seem so minor that it never really bothered me. Still, it’s important to weigh these kinds of microtransactions when playing Lost Ark.

Amazon Game’s second run at the MMO market is very impressive. The years of content already created for Lost Ark provide an enticing package filled to the brim with fun activities and exciting locals to explore. Each class is wonderfully unique, and the customization systems allow for an abundance of freedom to tailor to a variety of playstyles. I’ve had a great time with Lost Ark in these early days, and I’m looking to sink many more hours into it with friends over the coming weeks and months. Those looking to scratch an Action/RPG itch or sink time into an MMO won’t go wrong giving this adventure a fair shot.

Score: 8.25

About Game Informer's review system

Purchase

Read More

Martha Is Dead Review - Martha Ain't Great, Either

Reviewed on: Xbox Series X/S
Also on: PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC
Publisher: Wired Productions
Developer: LKA
Rating: Mature

Martha Is Dead starts extremely strong, introducing immediately a dynamic between twin sisters Martha and Giulia that sets the stage for the entire game. Giulia’s mother never loved her the way she loved Martha, and this relationship, or lack thereof, has eaten away at Giulia’s spirits for years. After Giulia finds Martha, drowned in a lake, her mother runs to embrace Giulia, mistakenly believing her least-favorite child perished. Finally, she gets the love and affection she’s always wanted. What happens next is unexpected, jaw-dropping even, and I was immediately captivated by the premise. Unfortunately, Martha Is Dead quickly becomes a chore to play.   

I felt at odds with the gameplay the moment I began exploring Giulia’s family villa. Walking feels like trudging through mud, which is especially frustrating because this game is all about walking around and interacting with objects to learn more about what’s going on. Occasionally you run through poorly-explained dream-like scenarios, or participate in simple minigames, like using a camera and its photos to piece together answers about who was at the lake the night of Martha’s death. However, for the most part, you do a lot of walking and a lot of looking at things. One scenario makes you avoid an enemy, which adds some tension that I wish was more present in other areas of the game. But, because most of what you’re doing is walking, the game feels less like traditional horror and more like watching a story unfold that happens to be horrific in nature.

Click here to view embedded media

 

To make matters worse, interacting with objects is also a bore. Pressing on the right thumbstick reveals interactive objects, which quickly grows annoying because the on-screen symbols disappear within seconds. As a result, I continually pressed the right thumbstick over and over. As if to make this annoyance an even bigger stumbling block, the controls sometimes completely change. Instead of interacting with an object by pulling the trigger, you inexplicably have to press A. These frustrations coupled with progress-stopping bugs began to tear down the initial intrigue I felt during the opening. 

Interacting with some objects, like letters or your dead sister’s body, leads to side objectives. None of these are as engaging as the main mystery, but a handful of side tangents are serviceable, like one where I found a tire pump to unlock a bike that made traveling around the villa slightly faster. For some, I had to use an in-game camera that can be decked out with accessories that change how the camera can be used and skins, which are collectibles that are purely cosmetic. I enjoyed the mechanics around the camera’s focus, distance, lens types, and more, such as having to use the d-pad ever-so-slightly to make an image snap into focus. I was glad the camera was such a big part of the main objective, too. The game’s darkroom, which tasked me with developing my photos in an old-school realistic way using a timer and the controller sticks, made the use of this camera even more immersive.

Despite a few engaging segments, a lot of objectives are half-baked or poorly explained. For example, I spent 30 minutes looking for a side-quest key (or so I thought), only to discover later that I couldn’t obtain it until I completed a significant story moment much later in the game. I wish LKA did a better job indicating when you can’t progress in a quest until furthering the main story. 

For a game that leans so heavily on narrative, the story of Martha Is Dead rubbed me the wrong way in many ways. Some of the most significant moments in the game ask you to sympathize with Martha and Giulia’s parents: a Nazi general and a woman who doesn’t seem fazed to be married to a Nazi. I particularly enjoyed helping Italian resistance forces defeat Nazis near my family’s villa. Oddly, though, the game asked me if I wanted to help the Italian resistance fighters or foil their plans by telling my Nazi father about them. Naturally, I didn’t entertain that option. LKA wove some big narrative threads into the family dynamic, but I didn’t connect with them because ultimately, I was never going to sympathize with a Nazi. 

In these moments, I was put off. There are ways that games have used Nazis to tell interesting stories, but this was not that. Martha Is Dead doesn’t praise Nazis or even indicate support for them, but the family’s Nazi connection doesn’t play into anything other than the fact that WW2 is happening. The parents are only used in ways to further enhance Guilia’s torture and trauma, but their Nazi beliefs aren’t an aspect of that. Why are they Nazis and why does it matter in Martha Is Dead that they are? These are questions I wished were answered. LKA uses the war surrounding this villa to showcase the grip Nazi Germany was losing on Italy in 1944, and Giulia’s dad eventually faces consequences for his part in it, but instead of using that moment to show him getting what he deserves, Martha Is Dead instead uses this narrative beat to further torture Giulia. 

Click here to view embedded media

 

Sadly, Martha Is Dead never reached beyond surface-level depictions of war. Martha Is Dead attempts to blend psychological horror and the horrors of war in a compelling way, but because one half of that equation falls short, the two never come together to create something truly satisfying. The story leans into gore and disturbing imagery, asking me to do things more gruesome than anything I’ve done in a game before, but these moments don’t add meaningfully to the narrative or the experience. I was left feeling the gore was simply present for shock value as a result. 

When Martha is Dead isn’t about war, it is about the central mystery of how Martha died. There are some supernatural elements at play, and a few captivating revelations. Too often, however, Martha Is Dead uses the “your memories betray you” trope right before a big reveal about how events really played out. These cheap twists are disappointing every time because they don’t feel earned. 

Without spoiling the story, I finished the game dissatisfied and confused about everything I played. This was especially unfortunate because the initial premise was so compelling. The delivery of the story’s twists, and the way the game touches on some serious mental health themes, was disappointing. When the credits roll, the game displays a message about getting help if you need help, something Giulia wasn’t able to do in Martha Is Dead. While that’s true, it felt more like a sticker slapped onto this game, which in the six hours prior, never made a real or meaningful commitment to exploring these feelings in a respectful and sensical way. 

LKA made the best recreation of an Italian setting I’ve ever seen in a game and I wanted nothing more than to enjoy it. However, LKA’s love of Italy is the only warmth I felt in Martha is Dead. The rest left me feeling as cold as Giulia’s dead sister. 

---

It’s important to note that some of the content in Martha Is Dead has been edited on PlayStation platforms, and while LKA and Wired Productions have revealed what that edited content is, we won't mention it here because it's quite spoilery. 

Score: 6

About Game Informer's review system

Purchase

Read More