If you've followed shooters for any amount of time, you're probably aware of Duke Nukem 3D. It's hailed as one of the best games of its decade, and deservingly so. The game used an engine called Build, which was used in a few other games as well as Duke. While a lot of these were trash, there are two important ones: Blood, and Shadow Warrior. The former is a parody of horror movies, making references to things like Army of Darkness and The Shining, and the latter, which this review is focused on, is a parody of kung fu movies and oriental culture in general.
Shadow Warrior was released in 1998 to great applause, but it didn't see much financial success, maybe it was because of the dated engine or a variety of other factors, but Shadow Warrior is just as good as Duke Nukem 3D, and it's worth your time.
The story follows Lo Wang, a body guard for Zilla, the head of Zilla Enterprises, a company that has power over almost every industry in Japan, and he plans to gain further power through using powers of "the dark side." Lo Wang quits his job because of this, and finds out that Zilla killed his old mentor. He swears revenge and the story pretty much stops existing there. As with almost every 90s shooter, sans the Marathon trilogy, it's barebones and really just exists to give you an excuse to blow things up.
Gameplay is similar to Duke 3D in a lot of ways, probably due to the engine it uses. From jumping physics to enemy behavior, it's all very similar to that game, though Shadow Warrior still adds new additions to keep things from feeling too similar. Every weapon has been replaced and a few new items have been introduced, though the items are largely useless. Weapons include things like dual-wielded Uzis, Missile and Grenade Launchers, Railguns, and even a nuke for the Rocket Launcher. As cool as some of these sound though, a few of them are way underused. The Grenade Launcher is only really helpful on boss fights, the Ripper Heart is just flat out useless, and the Sticky Bomb takes an overly long amount of time to detonate.
A lot of the enemies are very reminiscent of other Build engine games, but there are a lot of interesting new ones, like Kamikazes and these bear-like things called Rippers. None of the enemies function a like, and it has some good variety going for it. There's not much bullet sponging from the enemies either, so you won't be down on ammo constantly. There's a few boss fights in game, and to be honest, they're kind of underwhelming. The strategy for all of them is, shoot, run into cover, shoot, and repeat for however many shots it takes to put them down. The difficulty of the game though can be a bit overbearing even on Normal, as the enemies, even weaker ones, can dish out an onslaught of damage constantly. I got used to it for the most part, but it still caught me off guard sometimes. Just save a lot and you'll be good.
Graphically, the game looks great for the time and there's some interesting quirks that were added to the engine, too. Item pick ups are no longer sprites, and are instead rendered as fairly primitive looking 3D objects. While it might look dated by todays standards, it's really impressive for the time. As should be expected from 3D Realms, the art direction is fantastic like with Duke. Environments and objects are nicely detailed and are nice to look at. Sound is fantastic too, with a great CD soundtrack and well made sound effects.
Overall, Shadow Warrior is on the same league as Duke Nukem 3D in my opinion. Great gameplay, great sound, great graphics, it all adds up to one fantastic package. Finding an original copy of the game is a chore, and, thankfully, this Steam release fixes that. It includes the original game and both expansion packs, Twin Dragon, and Wanton Destruction. The bugs in both of them have been fixed, too, so you can actually finish the latter. For $10, this game is more than worth it.
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