A couple of sales ago, I decided to take the plunge on Shadow Warrior 3, and am I ever glad that I did!… I’m almost an hour in, so I can’t fully judge the game just yet, but what I’ve played and witnessed so far has been a real downgrade from the other two. The gameplay has been oversimplified compared to its predecessors; gone are the days of pressing certain buttons to perform sword techniques, your blade has been banished to your right mouse button!
For Shadow Warrior 3 the developers switched from their in house Flying Wild Hog Engine to Unreal Engine 4, and while it doesn’t look terrible it does seem to lack the detail that the previous games had. Gameplay also seems to have more of a classic linear approach… kind of underwhelming when you’ve played the previous installments. There is also more cutscene than the other two games combined, though they do at least look nice… I would of happily traded them in for the combat system from the previous games though. This installment in the series is giving me Serious Sam 2 vibes.
From what I’ve read it takes about 7 hours to complete the game, so I’ll be sure to take it slow as I do with most of my library. 😛 Maybe I’ll warm up to the game after a little more play time? I’ll write more about it as I progress. So far I’m not really feeling it, hopefully it picks up.