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Shadow warrior chapter 3 series#
Players start a level, run and grapple hook down a series of corridors and out-door-idors, enter into a vaguely round room, and thus the killing begins.
![shadow warrior chapter 3 shadow warrior chapter 3](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/CCNKQSPvF8M/maxresdefault.jpg)
The problem emerges as the broader gameplay loop becomes clear. Taking advantage of an increasingly bulging weapons wheel and a dedicated ‘right click to katana’ attack, players wall run, grapple, explode barrels and deploy environmental traps as they tear through increasingly vicious waves of enemies later in the game. Looping and weaving through the death traps of Shadow Warrior 3’s arenas is where the game comes closest to success.
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It means the narrative rarely stops to marinate in the world it’s building, often too concerned with getting you to the next bullet arena or back into the combat, where the majority of the game’s design highlights lie. Owing mostly to the game’s highest priority of maintaining an entirely unserious tone, Shadow Warrior 3’s refusal to truly care about any of the cultural touch-stones it’s taking advantage of kneecaps the game. Significant betrayals and deceptions are passed over in a manner of moments, character relationships are grown and changed with throwaway lines of dialogue, and the cast of the game is so small that the plot starts to feel like a minor group-chat argument between four horrible, irritating people rather than an adventure to save the world.Īside from the core combat experience, everything in Shadow Warrior 3 feels tangential most of all Polish developer Flying Wild Hog’s setting and cultural borrowings from Japanese folklore and mythology, which are given all the thematic weight of decorations for a child’s birthday party. Of course, Shadow Warrior 3 is enthusiastically irreverent to the bone, so the stakes never feel terribly meaningful, yet strangely, the game’s tone is constantly hot-footing between caring too much and too little about its characters and world. What you get with Shadow Warrior 3 is a linear rush across the game’s ‘neo-feudal Japan’ setting, listening to Lo Wang karaoke-ing and quipping his way through largely same-y combat encounters. I never thought I would describe an apocalyptic mission to slay a world-ending dragon as ‘quaint’, but here we are. However, while Shadow Warrior 3 seeks to efficiently trim the series down to a state as razor sharp as a katana, it instead ends up feeling like a slice of life out of a more interesting, expansive game. Paring itself down from the RPG-lite frills of Shadow Warrior 2, a game replete with transferable weapon power-ups, enemy health bars and optional missions, Shadow Warrior 3 emerges from its diligent note-taking during the recent ‘ Doomassiance’ by directly attempting to ape the structure, gameplay loop and progression systems present in both 2016’s Doom and 2020’s Doom Eternal.