Shadow Warrior 2

Good fun...if bought on sale. I thought it looked great on The Steam Deck and ran smoothly most of the time. I was having a lot of fun for a good 8 hours and then it became... a little repetitive. First, it was challenging but became a very easy and samey. The loot system in general seemed pointless - the same upgrades again and again, most of them slight variations. A wide variety of weapons, but not real need to investigate. I ended up with the same double sword from the beginning upgraded. I never bought anything from the shop, so it seemed pointless. By the last few hours I was just waiting for it to end. I couldn't tell you what the story was and Wang is actually pretty annoying! But discounted, it was great value and a lot of fun for several hours.

hell yeah

Shadow Warrior 2 continues the story from the first game, bringing back familiar characters like Hoji and Ameonna along the way. The story itself is not bad, but it is not good either. The ending especially felt confusing to me, or maybe just too vague and ambiguous. I also did not enjoy the dialogue that much, as it tries very hard to be funny, but often ends up feeling annoying or cringe instead. There are moments where it works, and I know some people really like this style, but overall it did not click with me. I know this kind of humor was popular back in the day though, so maybe I would have liked it more if I played it as a child. Combat, on the other hand, is excellent. It improves on the first game in pretty much every single way. Everything feels faster, smoother, and more polished. This was easily the best part of the game and the main reason I kept playing, especially during moments when the story started to bore or annoy me. The combat is honestly superb. Crafting is more of a mixed bag. The idea itself is good, and I like that you can slowly improve your weapons and even change how they play by adding elemental effects or different modifiers. The problem is the execution. Getting upgrades relies way too much on RNG, and you spend a lot of time sorting through your inventory and trying to craft something useful for your build. The system feels rushed and not fully thought through, but I still appreciate the effort behind it. The game also uses procedural map design, meaning locations are slightly different each time. I respect the non linear approach and the focus on side quests, but despite that, the map design felt weaker to me. Even if the maps were technically not the same, they often looked very similar and followed the same patterns. Because of that, the procedural aspect felt more like an illusion and frequent backtracking did not help either. I enjoyed Shadow Warrior 1 more as a complete package, but Shadow Warrior 2 has much better combat, which ended up being the most enjoyable part of the game for me.

我感觉这是我打过最爽的游戏之一

да

Shadow Warrior 2 is a sequel to the 2013 reboot of Shadow Warrior made by Flying Wild Hog Studio. Rather than deliver another experience identical to that game while advancing the story forward, Shadow Warrior 2 retains many of the gameplay elements of the previous game, but expanding the level design from a linear story-focused journey to a hub-based looter-shooter with an assortment of primary missions, side missions, and a bit of procedural generation thrown in for the latter. What this means for people who loved the original game's series of arena fights that scored and awarded the player "Karma" to upgrade abilities, is that those customization and light RPG elements have been fully expanded, with no more arena-like combat. Now, all enemies just grant karma upon defeat, and the player accumulates karma points continuously throughout the game, to drop into different abilities both physical, and involving the returning "Ki" magic. Swordplay has been greatly expanded, too. There isn't much to say critically about the story without spoiling things for those who never played the first game, but Lo Wang is now in a colorfully dystopian world where the shadow realm of demons and the mortal world have collided, which is part of why side mission areas reconfigure their topography every time you take new quests in them. Graphically this is the Road Hog engine at its finest (and final) hour before being replaced with Unreal 4 for the next game. If there are any complaints here, it's the grindy nature of looter-shooter mechanics themselves, making side missions a bit of a drudge as you spend hours killing X amount of this, or locating Y amount of that, and with the procedural generation taking over for all but the main story missions, there aren't really the cleverly-placed secrets and "retro room" Easter eggs the first game had, but all of the crass humor is here at least. Shadow Warrior 2 is a fun and more replayable game than the original, but loses something with the shift away from narrative-focused level design.

Good game, funny jokes, nice action and various enemies. Many weapons and upgrades/skill trees, able to make builds. 7.3/10