While you fought them in the original game, here the story gives it more of a purpose. When a rival crime boss refuses to sell it, and you take it by force, all hell breaks loose as a demonic race of monsters begins invading the Earth. In the game you play a reimagined Lo Wang who is now a prominent crime family member sent on a quest to find a mysterious sword. It shares some elements with Hard Reset, but is certainly not the “Hard Reset with a Shadow Warrior paint job” some of the fans of the original feared.

Shadow Warrior runs on the same custom engine that Hard Reset was made in. Would it throw in a lot of pointless cultural jokes? Would it retain the open maps of the old 2.5D era, or would it be a linear modern design? With Hard Reset behind them, Flying Wild Hog set out to reboot the franchise as a modern game that doesn’t forget about the 3D Realms game it came from. Many fans were perplexed when this new Shadow Warrior was teased leading up to release. While it never got as horrid as the stuff that showed up in the Postal series it certainly got a lot of ire, and faded away pretty quickly once Quake came out. The storyline wasn’t very memorable, and the humor in it started to cross the line of trying to be edgy, and veer into “This isn’t funny it’s just stupid, and mean” territory. In theory, fans of Duke 3D should have loved it as it carried over much of what was liked. There were two big problems with it. Built off of the Build engine that Duke Nukem 3D used, it had a long campaign, huge maps to explore, and a plethora of secrets.

The original Shadow Warrior was both a good, and bad game. Shadow Warrior takes a different approach, and oddly enough manages to pull that off without too many missteps along the way. Rise Of The Triad was a pretty great remake that essentially put new tech on an old game, without really changing too much of what made it awesome originally. Last year however there were a couple of pretty good ones. Movies often have a worse track record than games, but there have still been a large number of misfires over the last thirty years. HOLY REFERENCES BATMAN: Including Monty Python, Star Wars, and Stan Bush. Flying Wild Hog does it again.ĬONS: Some cheap enemies. PROS: An entertaining single player campaign. It’s rare when something fires on all cylinders, and meets or surpasses our lofty expectations. Other times they may get the core concept right, but little else. In many of those cases we find our worst fears come to pass, the story might be so far removed from the original it might as well have been its own franchise entirely. Many times as fans we have to cringe whenever one of our favorite movies, or games is remade.

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