Shadowgrounds is an alien shooter played from bird's eye perspective. It has a solid single player campaign, serviceable art and sound design and you'll likely enjoy blasting away at its aliens. It's one of those games that are nice for breaking up your routine, e.g. if you usually play puzzle games and are looking for a change now and then. It took me about 8 hours to play through the main campaign, so it's not a heavy time investment. Consider purchasing it when it's on sale.

Let's start of with 2 initial hurdles that you may face:

1. This game doesn't support changing to wide screen resolution (e.g. 1920 * 1080) via the options menu
   
2. Xbox controllers aren't supported out of the box either. Controls can be set ingame, but unfortunately not all of them and some controls like the joysticks didn't register at all.

To fix both of these, you'll have to manually edit some text files. If you google the respective problem you'll find easy to follow tutorials. It's not too hard and doesn't take long, but the developer should really add an update so that these options are supported out of the box.
Disclaimer: I have not played the game with mouse and keyboard but I imagine it works just fine.

Now that the starting problems are dealt with, how does the game play? It's generally fun and
the controls are very responsive. All the guns in this game have characteristics that set them aside and make them better in certain situations and worse in others. Enemies also have weaknesses do different weapons, e.g. some bugs get easily toasted by the flamethrower while other are best taken out by bouncing grenades around the corner. You are often stripped for ammunition in this game, so you'll really have to make use of your entire weaponry instead of always using the most powerful gun. It adds immensely to the tension, the survival aspect and the strategy of the game.

The radar that shows nearby enemies (but only if they're moving) is also a good device to both add tension and utility to the game. You can also bring up a map for navigation but this really should have been integrated into the radar!

graphics
The graphics aren't too special (not for 2016 anyways) but the art direction is done very well for this kind of game. The graphics are very clear, meaning you'll always know what the combat situation is like and you'll never be overwhelmed by visual clutter on the screen. The not-as-demanding graphics meant that I could rock along with a solid 60+ frames per second (FPS) at any time, making for a very smooth experience.

map and mission design
The map design ranges from boring in some places to stellar in entire section. The fourth chapter/map that you'll play is called "New Atlantis" and shows of this stellar design. It really feels like you're exploring a large research that humans would build on a foreign moon. There's also general multiple ways to reach your destination and little side areas to discover. Unfortunately the game doesn't hold up to this standard in all areas, especially the last mission is rather disappointing and quite different from the rest of the game.

enemies
A special shoutout goes to the enemy design. Some of the aliens don't have a sense of hearing! I'm confident this was was intentional by the designers as they are a different species biologically – so why should they have all the senses that humans have!? There's even one type of critter that's basically not very dangerous to you, but hard to hit. So in the end it ends up being a threat by potentially depleting your ammo supply!

audio
The sound design is good but not spectacular. Again the design is clean, meaning reduced to what really matters. E.g. there's invisible enemies in the game, but they give off a distinct screaming like sound when you're close. I found the music rather bland and during scripted events it would often overshadow audio cues important to the gameplay. The voice acting is o.k. and servicable for the campaign. Your clearly not buying this game for the shooting and not for its audio.

The story is quite generic (alien infestation of a human space station) but especially during the first half of the game it has a good nuance of realism: the protagonists simply do what ordinary people would do during such an event. You are not cast into the role of a super human soldier in this game but are simply a mechanic that happens to be there and wants to survive. It completely derails towards the end though (think of the movie Independence Day. In the final stages you are hacking alien technology, invading the mothership, and performing other quite impossible feats. It's also inconceivable how an alien mothership stockpiles a healthy supply of human medikits and ammunition for human weapons. The aliens also conveniently set up teleporters that let you destroy their shield generators.

Throughout the game there's many optional pieces of information that you can gather by looking at computer screens, notes left by survivors, etc. These give you details on the backstory of the universe and add to the immersion. I've enjoyed reading them more then the stiff cutscenes or some of the cheesy dialog.

I did not encounter any major bugs except once (player and enemy models turned invisible), restarting the mission easily fixed that, but my progress was lost. These things could have been better though:

• Having to manually edit files for screen resolution and controller setup (see above).
  
• On widescreen resolutions the text on screen is kind of warped. You won't be reading a lot during this game though, so no biggie.
  
• If you die, you respawn at a set point. During some events spawn points are placed directly next to the enemies though. This can result in you instantly dying again after respawning.
  
• There should have been a map integrated into the radar for easier navigation.
  
• Cringeworthy dialog lines from the stereotypical characters that are meant to come off as cool.

All in all this game focusses on the essentials and gets them right. Buy this game if you're looking for fun gunplay & shooting, don't care about a deep story and enjoy scavenging through abandoned space stations. I also recommend it if you don't usually play twinstick shooters (like me) but want to venture into the genre.

I liked this game. I'm not much on top-down games, but this one seemed to work ok. There's a lot of blasting aliens to be had, and for some reason I always seemed to be down to the pistol. Also, in case you like to jump right in like I do, TAB will bring up mission objectives, upgrades, the log, and a map. I found that out 3/4 of the way through the game because I was too busy blasting stuff. Oops!

Plus - the character you're playing is named Wesley.. Glad to see he's not just fetching mamma's prybar like in the Simpsons!

I only had a couple of problems throughout the game - one was in the mothership part 1, where I got stuck on some little part of the wall just out and to the left of the entrance, and I got blasted, and then it attracted the monster down the hall directly to the respawn point, where he blasted me again (and again).

The only other minor problem is with the sound. The boss battle / major battle music comes on a lot louder than the rest of it. I understand, but for me I'd like it to only be a little louder, not blast me outta the seat louder. The voices are very quiet, so if you turn it up to hear the voices, you'll get a little surpise when the major battle music comes on!

I had a lot of fun playing, and blasting everything in sight (monsters, windows, boxes, etc.).
2006 was a while ago, but I prefer my games with a retro feel anyway.

Overall, a really fun killfest, and when it's on sale it's an insanely good deal!

8-16-2016

This game is like a VERY bad version of Alien Breed. A lot of bugs and glitches. It's only good part is that this game i quite cheap. I don't recommend it.

I got the game for real cheap and finnished it in 4h. The game is kinda challanging at times if you are a potato playing on a potato. If you don't want to actually pay attnetion to the storyline here it is (no spoilers): "Tyler, stop sucking ♥♥♥♥ and help us." Meanwhile you are actually killing things the size of Trump Tower and as beautiful as Hillary Clinton. There you have it. Get the game when it is on sale. Not worth the full price. oh, and try to play it drunk or high if you want to not blow your brains out.

10/10
IGN






SUCK MY CHUBBY

Definitely worth a shot if you enjoy this sort of games in general. I don't even really like top down shooters, but Frozenbyte did it right.

While the game doesn't excel at much, it is overall a fun game with quite difficult gameplay. The recommended difficulty by the game is "easy". It can be atmospheric, especially at first and really frighten with sound and graphics which have held out quite well. Whereas the voice acting is atrocious and the story not engaging, Shadowgrounds makes up for it with excellent gameplay and fantastic balanced weapon system

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I haven't got a hold of this game before.
But it's really entertaining, bit cheesy with the voice acting but that's about it.

I love the fact that EVERYONE sees the main character like a simpleton, that needs to do his job harder, hahaha, even though he single handedly beat the living crap out of massive dangerous aliens.

A "good job" could be nice to hear, but they're like "Eh... you gotta do your job harder man."

10/10

I like the game. My only problem (which is a bit personal) is the main girl in the story omg she pisses me off so much and does so little for anything in the game demanding everything. Shes a like the annoying wife you married and wish you could divorce her but you cant cause she'll gain everything leaving you with nothing. Other then that its a good top down 3 person shooter with a good story.

Pros:
+Non-stop action
+Intensive atmosphere
+An homage to old-school shooters
+Wide arsenal of weapons

Cons:
-Uninteresting story
-Laughable voice acting
-Becomes repetitive after some time
-Glitchy AI

Score: 7.5 out of 10
Buy it only if it's on sale