Shadow Warrior Preview: The Dismemberments You Deserve

We may just be experiencing the beginnings of a golden age of comedy in games. 2013 is the year of Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, Saints Row IV, Rise of the Triad, and now Shadow Warrior, and what those games all have in common is that they deliver actual laugh-out-loud jokes in spades, rather than the mild humor that makes us merely smile that we most often encounter.

Compared with the other three games, Shadow Warrior plays it the straightest; Flying Wild Hog doesn't seem to be winking at the players even as they attempt to make us laugh. Indeed, the plot, while certainly b-quality, is not in itself a joke. As the game begins, Lo Wang is tasked with dropping $2 million on a sword he thinks has little significance, and this leads to a standoff between him and an army of thugs working for the man who possesses the sword. “I can pay with money, or I can pay with blood,” Wang utters dramatically as he draws his sword. Presented earlier and again later as a bit of a dumbass, we learn even before we take over and begin cutting people apart that he's not actually a joke. 

But once you are in control, it becomes obvious very quickly that the sword Wang wields must be the primary appeal for a reboot of Shadow Warrior for both the player and the devs. Sure, being a reboot of an old-school game is a legit marketing tool, but it's not as if we're in short supply of options on that front. A lot of old games would give you a crowbar or wrench or baton or let you use your fists to wack fools, but unless you were playing like a Goldeneye knife battle there was no really point in going that route. Halo 2 and its successors, on the other hand, showed us that an overpowered melee can hold some appeal for a modern player.

And so here we are with a game that starts you out with a melee weapon that is so pleasing to use that when you do get a firearm you won't even use it. And it isn't just about the wonderful aesthetics using the sword gives us – though huge spurts of blood and limbs flying every which way is an incredible sight in this age of blades that leave their victims intact – but also its utility. In the preview build I played, the sword was simply the most effective tool of death at my disposal. Your first ranged weapon is a pistol that packs a wallop, but the fire rate is slow enough that a miss is pretty darn annoying.

The sword, meanwhile, will take out most standard foes in one or two hits, sometimes a single swing will slice more than one of them, and you don't have to aim that sucker. So on those occasions when you've got ten demons running at you – which WILL happen – whipping out a pistol or submachine gun is simply the wrong move.

Outside the scope of this preview build, there are firearms you'll want to use in Shadow Warrior later on, probably. That said, there are parts of the game I've played in the past that are not in the preview, and so it remains to be seen if I'll ever want to abandon my beloved sword after relying on it so heavily in the early stages. 

In any case, what you need to know here is that Shadow Warrior is a very sharply written experience that encourages you to use a sword that will actually do tangible damage to every enemy you hit with it. We're moving into a new generation in which apparently dismemberment during sword fights is not going to be a thing, but an indie studio called Flying Wild Hog is doing what tech juggernaut Crytek can't or won't, and that's a beautiful thing.

Addendum: Now, if only we could get Kojima Productions to throw their dynamic MGR cutting tech over to the Hog. I have no complaints about the dismemberments in Shadow Warrior, but they are based on predetermined cut points. Yes, there are a lot of them, but stuff just doesn't break down the way it does in MGR. But that doesn't really matter. It's good enough. I'm just noting it could be better.