Shadow Warrior 2 [official site] could have gone horribly wrong. The 2013 reboot succeeded because it took the principles of a nineties FPS and dragged them kicking and bleeding into the twenty-first century, adding superb melee combat controls, a well thought-out upgrade system, but sticking with linear levels packed with easter eggs and secrets. It was the best of the old and the best of the new.

For their sequel, Flying Wild Hog have kept the fundamentals but built an entirely different game atop them. Part Borderlands, part interactive chainsaw massacre, it throws everything at the wall and hopes there’s enough blood to make most of it stick.

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Given that Shadow Warrior 2 [official site] has a squillion weapons, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised to learn that the supernatural FPS has a Warhammer 40K-style chainsword. It looks pretty great! There’s a terrible moment each time Lo Wang strikes an enemy, a drawn-out dragging as the chainsword’s teeth bite into flesh. I wonder how much time went into perfecting that. Anyway! I’ll surely rev one up myself after Shadow Warrior 2 launches on October 13, but for now we can watch Lo Wang swinging his in this 12-minute gameplay video:

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Shoot and slice ’em up Shadow Warrior 2 [official site] is set to launch October 13. It’s a bloody, over-the-top ninja adventure that doesn’t take itself too seriously. There’s a guy taking a selfie as he decapitates a monster, so there’s stuff in there us millennials can relate to, too. It’s also shaping up to be quite beautiful if you look past all of the gore spraying everywhere. In the trailer below, Flying Wild Hog has recreated the subtle fall foliage of November in Japan contrasted with the white-washed walls of austere Buddhist temples. Lovely!

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Demons, in Shadow Warrior 2 [official site], appear to be made of jelly. I m carving one particularly big bastard open like a Christmas turkey and the segments that slide away are like the gelatinous gloop and gristle sliding from a tin of cheap dogfood. They wibble and wobble, quivering beneath the teeth of my chainsaw. They fold and flop, eventually disintegrating.

The ultraviolence is more over the top than in the game s predecessor, but it s nothing new. That s just about the only place that the sequel takes the more of the same approach though. Almost everything has changed.

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Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>

But which Shadow Warrior do I mean? Despite my love of the magnificent Build Engine, not the 1997 original which never worked its way into my heart in the way that Blood did. Gotta have some Blood in your heart. But, no, I’m talking about the distant year of 2013, when Hard Reset developers Flying Wild Hog released a game that surprised me by being one of my favourites of the year.

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The Shadow Warrior reboot was one of the most pleasant surprises I’ve had since I started writing about games. It’s a superb action game that does first-person melee combat well, has gorgeous environments, and managed not to feel like a throwback to the skeevier parts of the Build Engine days while capturing so much that I loved about the era. I can’t wait for the sequel [official site], and these twelve minutes of blood, bickering and burning demons make it all the more attractive.

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Shadow Warrior 2 [official site] looks full of places I’d like to swim, and I can’t think of a higher compliment to pay a game’s environment artists.

Shadow Warrior 2 also looks full of some of the nicest-looking first-person shooting I’ve seen out of E3. A new 13-minute gameplay trailer shows off the demo build they took to E3, with Lo Wang and a co-op pal fighting demons through a village’s streets and over its rooftops, into a temple. The speed and slickness of it all looks cool as heck. Check out this cool murder:

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Four-player co-op and missions into procedurally-generated lands are the two biggest shiny new things Shadow Warrior 2 [official site] will bring, publishers Devolver Digital announced this afternoon following a teasingly short teaser campaign.

Lo Wang will return in 2016 as a mercenary murdering folks and swiping loot while trying not to be murdered by demons. This time he’ll have friends to help with that. Also guns, a sword, and magic powers, same as ever. Come have a look in the first trailer.

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Shadow Warrior 2: Wang Harder. 2 Wang 2 Warrior. Shadow Warrior: The Secret of the Wang. Shadow Warrior And The Last Wang/Raiders of the Lost Wang/Kingdom of the Crystal Wang/Wang of Doom. Judgement Wang. Shadow Warrior VII: The Wang Awakens. Shadow Warrior: The Wang of Ultron.

Wang World.

Evidence points toward an official Shadow Warrior 2 [official site] announcement in the near future (and, hey, isn’t E3 in the near future?). I have collected the evidence in a small pile, along with some lint and pistachio shells.

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