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Tech

‘Shadow Warrior 2’ Is One of the Dumbest, Best Games of the Year

A shooter so dumb it circles back to genius.
Image: Devolver

Shafts of moonlight illuminate a courtyard lined with cherry blossoms, pagodas, and enemies that seem like the doodles of a bored 14 year old: cyborg ninjas, giant spiders, and missile launching mechs.

I jump high in the air and land right in the middle of the fray, slash my way out with an electric katana, then dash around the remaining enemies—many of which are missing limbs now—while unloading a World War's amount of munitions. It's just a mess of explosions and blood until there's nothing left to shoot and the courtyard is a buffet upgrades: new weapons, new skills, and other goodies that will make the next encounter of this kind an even more chaotic, more grotesque power fantasy.

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Shadow Warrior 2 is one of the dumbest, most entertaining games I've played this year. Earlier this year, Doom proved that there's a lot to be gained by stripping the first-person shooter genre back to its 90s-era form, which focuses on constant movement and constant shooting and barely anything else. Story? Go read a book. Puzzles? No thanks, nerds. Shadow Warrior 2 doubles-down on that design philosophy. It's as if Polish developer Flying Hog Games asked what if it made a game with psychopathic focus on shooting and killing things, realized that it wasn't the most inspiring idea, and did it anyway.

Image: Devolver

The result is tremendous. Doom is still overall a better game—a tight, perfect celebration of the cultural phenomenon that made first-person shooters what they are today. Every weapon and enemy in that game interlock to create a violent rhythm that speeds up until it explodes. There's no fat on it. Shadow Warrior 2 hits a lot of the same notes, but where it is less balanced, or has less inspiring weapons and enemies, it compensates with breadth and bombast. It has dozens of weapons, each of which can be upgraded with added fire or lighting effects. It has a variety of skills that will make your character run at 90 miles per hour or jump high up in the air. It has a whole spell system that will make spikes come out of the ground and skewer you enemies or air-blast them off the edge of a cliff.

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The constant drip of rewards, which like Diablo or Borderlands are color-coded to indicate value (from worthless grey to "epic" orange), gives it a habit forming edge over Doom. Not only is it fun tearing enemies up moment to moment, there's a longer arc of collecting these goodies and seeing how they modify the next encounter that keeps me coming back.

Shadow Warrior 2 is everything that makes shooters look incredibly dumb to people who don't play them and exceptional to people who do. I love a big, dumb shooters, and if that is where Shadow Warrior 2's stupidity ended I would recommend it without reservations.

Image: Devolver

The problematic, baffling choice it makes is that it also wants to tell something resembling a story, and it's ill-equipped to do so. Shadow Warrior 2 and the 2013's Shadow Warrior are reimaginings of the 1997 original, which itself is a shooter in the tradition of the proudly stupid Duke Nukem 3D. They're very similar games, only instead of embodying the cigar-chomping, misogynistic American Duke, in Shadow Warriors players embody a ninja names Lo Wang.

About half of what he says is a Wang-related joke in a fake Japanese accent (Wang is voiced by a white actor), and he has way too much to say. Not only with quips while beheading demons, but also with extended dialogue sequences between missions, which you can mercifully skip. This is at best a huge waste of time and distraction from what's good about Shadow Warrior 2 and probably offensive if you care to think about it for more than two seconds.

Thankfully, anything Wang has to say is easy to ignore, and that's exactly what I recommend. It's only $40 on Steam, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4 right now and it's one of the best shooters of the year despite itself.