Shadow Warrior original

I haven’t played the original 1997 Shadow Warrior, and without any rose-tinted glasses, I was slightly hesitant to approach the remake. What I found is a solid game that doesn’t bother with taking itself seriously. While I cannot say if it’s faithful to the original, I can say that Shadow Warrior is a fun, if unsophisticated, ride. You play as Lo Wang, a comic-book collector who also happens to be a master of combat. Inevitably, the katana comes out and most of East Asia is either lit on fire or covered in blood, which sets the visual atmosphere nicely. As for the main plot— does killing endless hordes of demons while searching for a magic weapon in a vague effort to bring down the antagonist sound familiar? Little jokes along the way, however, keep you entertained by the story, if not engaged. Combat is fast-paced and satisfying— you are equipped with a katana and some ranged weapons, spun around a few times, then pointed in the general direction of some monsters. With no block option and swarms of melee enemies, it’s easy to slip into simple button-mashing, but there are more than enough unlockable combo moves to keep things interesting. The original 1997 Shadow Warrior is not quite as old as these other shooters we’ve mentioned, and came out almost a year after the ground-breaking Quake. It used an updated version of the Duke Nukem 3D graphic engine and ended up as one of the best-looking first person shooters still to use 2D sprites for enemies, even though the rest of the game world was 3D.