Shadow Gangs

Good game, terrible port. I am not going to go into it too much as a game - If you have ever played Shinobi in the arcades or Sega home consoles, this is what we have here with a modern lick of pain and some nice parallax graphics. The vertical scrolling is just terrible however, behind time wise and often not scrolling up to show the whole part of the level. Music is fine, kind of electric guitar focused pop rock. The problem is the quality is GARBAGE. Obviously, it's 3yo now so the dev has no plans to fix it. The only game in my entire library where I can't eliminate screen tearing, and it's BAD. The game runs at 60 FPS - if i enable vsync in game it syncs to the panels 144hz rate BUT the game speed is tied to FPS so it plays at nearly 3x normal speed. If I use RTSS to cap at 60 FPS, the game is at the correct speed but obviously v-sync doesn't work cause it still tears, and this is with the display's adaptive sync enabled. I mean really bad line tearing right through a part of the screen horizontally, on every movement. If I force the display to 60hz prior to launch and enable in game v-sync, it speeds up again? What? If I use the GPU control panel to force v-sync there, even THAT does not work. I did get around it. Every time I launch the game, I keep the screen at the native 144hz refresh rate, the game forces the screen to 60hz on launch, I have to minimize the game (thankfully it supports 4K so this is not a problem on a 4K panel even in full screen) and then put the display back to 144hz. When I go back to the game windows, with v sync OFF in game, with RTSS ON to 60 FPS lock and with screen forced to 144hz AFTER game launch, I can finally play it. This has to be done every single time. Even options are stupid. Rather than having the usual A for enter and B for back, it's tied to whatever the fire button is. So I have to press X to select things and then B to go back, it's just so lazy. And if I have B assigned to back, I can't assign it to a game action (I wanted to assign it to magic). If you want to play this game, play it on a console. Those are much better although I can't verify if they are 4k, but at least they "just work". I CAN verify the switch version is 1080P and 720P handheld, so native, and works great. Just do not buy the Steam version, cause it's crap indeed. The dev is working on Shadow Gangs 2, so that's where their development time went. Even if it's a great game, I will not support them again because it's no excuse not to fix your first game. I mean ANY other game, anything, just works without tearing. ALL of them. And on the rare occasion I need GPU v-sync, that has always fixed it on every game in the past. I have no idea how it will behave on lower refresh rate screens but I presume even worse.