Shadow Warrior 3 Review

"Slash & Laugh"

Campaign

March 6, 2022 at 10:46pm
By Jason Stettner

This is the third main entry within the Shadow Warrior series and my first go at it. I hadn’t actually heard of the franchise prior, but after this one I might be taking a look at it further. The story follows fallen corporate shogun Lo Wang as he deals with some rather wild companions on a path to take on this massive mystical dragon.

You’re sort of just thrown into the action and while there is story here, it’s mostly the action and craziness that’s at the forefront. You’re going from area to area blasting away enemies and attempting to complete a series of tasks in order to eliminate this big beast.

Things are fairly grim at the start, aside from the state of the narrative the cutscenes audio and subtitles were off-sync. With that note, it was just that opening sequence where the problem occurred, it was very confusing while I was playing.

Anyways, it’s essentially an indie like DOOM Eternal gameplay wise. It feels practically the same where you blast enemies in a spot with bits of dialogue, parkour to the next spot and continue the process. That may make it sound rather simplistic, but that is somewhat the core of the action.

There are good bits of humor, some really over the top action and other surprises such as the odd boss fight. It does actually work to a solid degree, and I did enjoy playing it. Keep in mind that this is a single player campaign, with no other modes and not really a new game plus.

You do get to keep your upgrades if you start from the beginning, but there’s no chapter select or anything like that which is disappointing. The overall story last about five hours almost exactly for me, so most will take an extra hour or two I would imagine and that’s about it for this one.

Gameplay

This is largely a first person shooter experience where you get a range of weapons with more being granted over the course of the campaign. You also have this powerful blade, so it’s a mixture of slashing and shooting. It plays exactly the same as DOOM Eternal if you’ve played that.

You’ll be shooting, using environmental aspects to assist such as spikes and then doing crazy parkour movement to get places. The comedic bits and story are fed in during these segments and it does work. The cinematics are really quite interesting as they look nice, but also greatly outshine the visuals. It looks somewhat aged, from the visual quality to the design of places.

It does have a nice popping with color visual art style but overall it looks fine. I did notice the occasional complete pause of action due to a frame rate issue or something along those lines but it wasn’t too often so not a terrible inconvenience. So in general it does run fine and looks decent enough. The enemy variety is fairly good, but it did get somewhat repetitive towards the end.

That could have been fixed easily with just an enemy variant or two more I felt. These creatures were definitely random in terms of what they were, largely funny. There are neat executions to unleash upon them which helps, but alas be wary of the Ancient Cock which was a wild foe to face off against.

The Conclusion

Shadow Warrior 3 is a solid shooter featuring frantic action that I could best describe as being an indie DOOM Eternal. I say that multiple times because that’s literally what the gameplay is like. As in, exactly that style for movement, shooting and design.

It’s not a bad element, but am just making the comparison clear. I found the story to be funny at times, and entertaining enough. It was a fun dash through the campaign, though I’ll likely not revisit it in the future. It’s one of those, one and done sort of things.

That’s fine though, I enjoyed it and laughed a bit along the way as I blasted weird enemies to oblivion. It’s enjoyable for what it provides, I didn’t have any issues too critically intense and I could see others having fun working through it. Upgrading stuff, maybe finding the really odd occasional secret in this linear story and of course enjoying the journey with the weird characters.

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Shadow Warrior 3 Review on Xbox Series X
Review Code Provided by Tinsley PR

Rating Overall: 7.1