I talked about how short I felt Ghostwire Tokyo was when I reviewed that. I must apologize to Ghostwire Tokyo because THIS game is literally 3 times shorter than Ghostwire. I bought this yesterday evening, played it for around an hour, then today played it part of the afternoon, then in the evening tonight I played… the last level. And that’s it, I’m done, and ready to review it.

So this review is coming really quick after finishing it, which came very quickly after buying it. Let’s just go, this won’t be a long one.

Developer: Flying Wild Hog
Publisher: Devolver Digital
Release date: March 1, 2022
Platforms: PC, PS4, Xbone (PC version reviewed)
Genre: FPS

Review

I honestly don’t know if this is a proper sequel to the second game, I didn’t actually finish that one because the mission-based looter-shooter structure of that one kinda bored me pretty fast so I never finished it. In this game, it seems most of the world is in ruins, as Wang has failed to kill a super-massive dragon. He teams up with Zilla, the antagonist from the previous games, alongside a witch named Motoko who is barely a character, to fight the dragon. They plan on using Hoji’s spirit as a sacrifice to get the power to kill the dragon, but Hoji is Wang’s friend so he runs off with Hoji’s mask to revive him and find another way to beat the dragon. And that’s about it. There’s hardly a story. There are literally just 4 characters, and they’re all lame. The writing isn’t anywhere near as funny as Shadow Warrior 2013. The new voice actors (they didn’t keep the old ones for Zilla and Wang) aren’t as good. This isn’t a game you’ll play for the story. It’s a shame, because one of the things this game DOES do well is actually pretty cool-looking cutscenes, with this fun split-screen thing going on in certain parts to show several actions/characters at once.

PC performance was mostly amazing on my 3700X/3060Ti PC. I was playing this at 1440p at high settings, with DLSS at the Quality setting, most of the game ran in the 160-180fps range (when I wasn’t forgetting to overclock my GPU, with a massive underclock I’d still get ~120fps). In some busier moments, I’ve seen it go down to ~120fps (with the absolute lowest I saw in a particularly busy battle in the final area of the game going down to 90fps, for just a second). There are some weird bits though. The game kinda freaks out at the start of every cutscene (despite running those at 1240fps for some reason), some of the textures are pathetically blurry low-res crap, and I noticed a few decorative elements running at ~20fps (while the rest of the game was running fine, so it was very easy to notice).

So there’s not gonna be much to talk about gameplay-wise. While Shadow Warrior 2 had this weird mission structure with a hub world thing going on, Shadow Warrior 3 is back to a linear, chapter-based game (that doesn’t even tell you when a chapter is done, except for the achievement popup).

This is an FPS that plays as simply as an FPS can at this point. You point at what you want dead and shoot until it dies. Wang’s tools are a few guns (pistol, very short-range shotgun, dual-wield full-auto rifles, grenade launcher, rail gun, and shuriken shooter), and a sword. The sword is fine but not super interesting. Wang can also double jump and dash. In the air you’re limited to one dash, on the ground you can almost spam it if you do it in the correct rhythm. Mainly though, you’ll be shooting the shit out of stuff and strafing about with occasional dashes. You also have a Chi push attack, which you can use to either push enemies off platforms or into spikes. It’s kinda useless until you power it up. The game is super fast, so it’s quite exciting to play.

One interesting gameplay element is the finishers. You fill up your finisher meter as you kill enemies and grab finisher pickups. Small enemies take 1 bar, medium enemies take 2, and really big enemies take 3. Doing a finisher can be done no matter how much damage was done to an enemy, so you can start a battle straight up with a finisher if you have enough finisher meter. What the finisher does is a quick animation similar to glory kills in DOOM, which will kill the enemy and fully heal you, but also each enemy will do a different thing. For example, one of the shitty enemies recovers 100HP above max, and another gives you an ice grenade to freeze all enemies within its range. Some of them get pretty wacky, like the disco laser grenade and the floating eye that stuns whatever you look at as you kill them. Some are good, some are meh. There’s not a massive selection of enemies though, so eventually, you’ll just use the one or two you’re good with and you’ll likely ignore the rest.

The levels have some orbs in them. Some are hidden very slightly off the linear path (you’ll rarely spend more than 10 seconds going off the path to find something), and some are right in the way. There are also challenges you can do. Stuff like “kill things with the shotgun from very close”, or “kill things while in the air”. Do enough of each action in the challenge menu and you’ll get an orb for that challenge. There are 2 orbs: weapon and character. Weapon orbs can unlock power-ups for weapons, and character orbs can unlock power-ups for Wang in 4 categories. The first power-up in each weapon or category takes 1 orb, the second takes 2 and the last takes 4. These are pretty okay, they make some of the weapons a bit more interesting (like the pistol causing explosions on headshots, or the dual-wield machine guns causing lightning damage and also placing lightning traps). An interesting upgrade for the sword is to make it spawn ammo when you hit stuff with it, it becomes the best way to replenish ammo.

And honestly, there’s nothing else to talk about here. There are 2 boss battles, they’re not very interesting. The levels are straight lines. The non-battle moments are boring because they’re so easy and require no thought or even reflexes (so you get moments that LOOK exciting, but actually aren’t). I didn’t even mention the grappling hook because, outside of the boring platforming segments, it’s kinda useless. You CAN use it in battle… but I saw no good reason to do so ever.

Overall

I thought it was fun, the shooting was cool, the weapons were okay, and some of the mechanics are interesting. Then after what feels like just a few minutes, you’re done, and the game is over. This is so freakishly short. And the story is pretty bad. There’s nothing really to do after you’re done, there’s a few difficulty levels but that’s it.

I don’t mind games being simplistic, but I wish there was just a bit more to this one. More, longer levels, maybe having more to the upgrade system, being longer than 4 and a half hours… It could just be more… more.

I would only recommend this game if you can get it for 5-10$.