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A level's openness often leads to aimlessness as you retread old ground trying to make your way back to a security office. Like many old shooters, Shadow Warrior does not always provide a clear direction, though it thankfully marks doors that lead to your objective with a golden glow. Nonetheless, a few idiosyncrasies may wear you down.

Shadow Warrior's diversity of enemies, weapons, and scenery keep its old-fashioned, bunny-hopping, guns-blazing approach fresh. In fact, levels give you plenty of breathing room, so you're rarely backed into a corner, literally or figuratively. On medium difficulty, battles aren't terribly stressful, but they find that magical sweet spot where you feel as if you overcame the odds without ever encountering the frustration that arises when too many enemies are shoved into too small a space. And so you sprint and strafe around, switching between firearms when the situation calls for it, or perhaps because you ran out of ammo. This variety doesn't exist for variety's sake, however: different enemies move at different speeds, exhibit different behaviors, and are vulnerable to different weapons. Throw in a handy sword, plenty of shurikens, a rocket launcher, laser-spewing demon heads, and more, and you've got a recipe for viscera stew. If you saw Duke Nukem's 2011 appearance as a personal slight, you'll be glad to know that Lo Wang still stands tall and proud. The shotgun, too, is a stalwart companion thanks to the ease with which it dispatches multiple skeletons in a single shot. The crossbow is a particular delight, given how it pierces shields and exposes the multi-horned freaks hiding behind them. You start with a simple revolver, which proves adequate enough when you're dealing with some low-rent grunts, but when the battle arenas get messy, you'll be glad of your impossibly gigantic arsenal. When the soundtrack kicks into high gear, you know a mob of demons is on the prowl, and the only way to escape death is to mow the mob down with your large array of punchy weapons. (Wang himself points out the triteness of signaling "Asian" with blossoming cherry trees.) Expected or not, the golden sunrays filtered through crowded bamboo stalks, and the resulting play of shadow and light on the murky water below, are stunning sights, and that serenity is a striking foil to the exuberant fantasy violence that pours from Shadow Warrior's thumping heart.Īs expected for a game that was spawned from a late-'90s shooter, Shadow Warrior's action is unrelenting. Many environments are lush and gorgeous if occasionally cliche. The juxtaposition of the silly and the serious can be jarring, leaving you to wonder if Shadow Warrior's dramatic and beautiful still-image scenes are appearing in the right game, but the dual-attitude narrative matches the game's overall tone. Shadow Warrior wears its dumb jokes lightly, peppering the high-octane action with immature quips but tackling the demonic soap opera of a story with straight-faced sincerity. The script tosses in some casual racial humor and a number of cringe-worthy Asian characterizations, but unlike Duke's return in Duke Nukem Forever, Lo Wang's reappearance isn't a sad and outdated one.

This first-person shooter is a remake-slash-reimagining of a 1997 game that took many of its cues from Duke Nukem 3D, and while most of the remake's jokes are new, the puerile spirit remains. Shadow Warrior's juvenile humor is in keeping with its forebear. You need a parachute to skydive twice." Thank you, fortune cookie, for the sage advice.

Farts ("Silent but deadly, indeed"), hipsters ("You should move to Portland and start a band"), and plenty of other topics provide humorous fodder, and goofy fortune cookies you find scattered about the game's spacious levels also get in on the act. Not that the contents of a man's underpants are the only subject Shadow Warrior touches on for humorous effect. After all, the main character's name is Lo Wang it would be criminal if the game didn't make a few obvious gags. If you like a good male genitalia joke, Shadow Warrior won't leave you hard up.