Shadow Warrior 2 is a peculiar sequel that manages to retain the enjoyable fast-paced, limb-shredding combat of the original and blend it with components of a looter-shooter like the Borderlands series. While the scope is far smaller and many aspects might feel a little underdeveloped to fans of the genre, the melee combat and gunplay is far more satisfying in moment-to-moment and player skill still feels as important as gear with higher DPS numbers.

The sequel picks up five years after “Cataclysm” witnessed in the first game, when demons flooded into the world, and expands on some of the established lore. Key characters from the original game return, you’ll spend time cohabiting yet another soul, you’ll spend a lot of time working with (or being betrayed) by the godlike ancients, and you will still make endless dick jokes throughout the adventure. The opening hours of the game are strong, with a good balance between narrative and gameplay, and you’ll enjoy exploring regions for the first time, discovering notes that reveal the backstory of some of the major NPCs in the world. Unlike the linear original, you use a simple map to teleport between missions and return to the slowly expanding hub town, complete with Wang Cave, to claim rewards and receive new quests. The frequent dialogue with and humorous banter between Lo Wang and his latest soul-bound companion Kamiko – both of whom want to part ways as soon as possible – will keep you entertained and on top of the plot.


One of the first locations you visit is the futuristic, neon-soaked Zille City that really shows off the improved visuals and incredible atmosphere.

Unfortunately, Shadow Warrior 2 suffers many of the inherent problems that come with the move to semi-randomised maps and hub-based mission structure. While the primary quests tend to feature unique or partially unique locations, the semi-randomised zones start looking incredibly similar. Throw in side quests that deliberately take you back to unique areas and you’ll get tired of seeing the same damn Zille Labs experiment rooms or Calamity City temple. With the inclusion of all the post-launch PC content, console owners also have an additional 14 “bounties”; effectively simple fetch or hunt quests in a free roam setting. If you do these bounties between missions – and you’ll want to for the loot and skill points they offer – the world becomes even less interesting as they are massive areas that stitch together almost the entire set of assets for each distinct zone.

As amusing as conversations with the bodiless ancient Zing may be, I stopped giving a damn the third time I fought my way up his illogically laid out TV station. In an early bounty mission, which returned me to the Zille Lab zone, I found an NPC that I rescued in the opening mission, still strapped to a gurney. Shadow Warrior 2 has an interesting story to tell, with big implications for any future games, but it’s poorly told thanks to design choices.


Wang is back and while the flow of the narrative feels a little stunted, the game still oozes style. Simple firing and reload animations, coupled with Wang’s cocky quips, never failed to amuse me mid-combat.

Unlike its predecessor, gameplay remained engaging throughout my initial 20 hour 100% solo run (about three dozen missions and bounties combined). While not as fully-featured nor as diverse as the Borderlands games, there are still plenty of locations to explore, enemies to kill, guns to collect and skills to upgrade.

Shadow Warrior had excellent, visceral melee combat and the sequel brings that back in spades. Swords are joined by a myriad of other melee weapons this time round and many skills revolve around melee-specific moves. You can select from casual, basic or advanced sword control, allowing you to direct your slices and lop off specific limbs. As a huge fan of Flying Wild Hog’s other FPS title Hard Reset Redux, firearms remained my go-to option for the majority of encounters and there are dozens to collect. Unlike other loot-based games, you’ll only receive melee weapons and guns with fixed starting stats, either from specific boss encounters or as mission rewards; how you choose to upgrade them or later, infuse them, is most the important bit. Of the 50+ weapons I accumulated in my initial run, there were only two or three that fell into the same category and were simply higher damage variants; the rest had distinct designs, bonus attributes, or unique firing and reload animations.

Once in combat, veterans of the first game will feel at home, even if the drop to a 30FPS refresh rate can take some time to get used to. The solid framerate, responsive controls and excellent motion blur ensure combat feels as fast and furious as the original, just a lot prettier and even more gory. Heads and limbs go flying, demon bodies explode, projectiles fill the air, and all the while you’ll smoothly run, jump, dash and wisecrack in the midst of the chaos. Aside from mission-specific dialogue, many of the classic quips return along with a few new ones for specific skills – hearing the cry of “crouching tiger, hidden Wang” after a successful stealth attack never got old.


Combat hits all the same highs as its predecessor, even if it starts off feeling a little slower. Organised chaos is probably the best description.

Upgrade gems, of various rarity levels and possessing ridiculous Diablo-style names, spew from slain foes; the name and level indicating certain attribute boosts. However, most high-level gems often have negative traits attached so it requires the player to pick their priorities. Every weapon has three slots for gems, some specific to the weapon or weapon type, allowing you to modify base attributes, firing modes, and apply elemental damage types – essential to tackling higher difficulties. You can also apply gems to modify your armour or powers, equip one amulet that typically offers a large boost to specific skills at the expense of others, and one amulet that provides coop-specific buffs. It’s a simple yet engaging system and I spent every visit back to the hub area optimising my arsenal to ensure I had a full spread of elemental damage available. As in action-RPG games, tougher enemies and bosses come with a range of immunities and vulnerabilities you need to consider.

While the number of available weapon upgrades and players skills has increased, the resource system has been simplified. Cash is used to buy gems, restore ammunition, and purchase rare weapons or skills from hub vendors. Karma gained during combat doles out Skill Points (SP) at specific intervals and these may be invested in a range of active and passive skills. The higher the level and benefit of the skill, the more SP required to advance. With the ability to reset SP at any vendor, there is incentive to spend as much time optimising your skills as your weapon loadout. With a few minutes spent optimising gear, the final boss went form a ten minute slog, chipping away at a huge pool of health, to a two minute affair thanks to a 250-round fire-spitting mini-gun with multiple critical-hit buffing gems. If there’s one downside to the new Diablo-esque mechanics, the need to carefully target weak points on specific enemies is now optional. Weak points still exist for bonus damage but you can get away with just piling on the right kind of elemental damage most of the time.


I was thrilled when I found this secret location in the second mission. I was less impressed when I found it over and over again every time I identified the identical map layout in later missions.

As you progress through the campaign, you unlock the ability to craft your own gems into better variants. In addition, completing a series of tough combat trials also allows you to purify them to remove negative traits, add additional gem slots to weapons, and infuse your favourite weapons to boost their basic attributes. These crafting option consume a third resource, Orbs of Masamune, which awarded for repeating the combat trials or replace the mission rewards in NG+.

At any time, you can invite other players to join your game for coop action. Up to four players can tackle any mission together, with each player seeing themselves as Lo Wang and their companions as generic ninjas from the hub area. Only the host can progress mission objectives but each player will receive a share of combat Karma and level rewards, assuming they have not completed the quest before. I played a couple missions with a melee focussed teammate and it was great fun, and super effective, to have them plunge into the thick of combat while I rained down fire from afar.

Shadow Warrior was an attractive game, albeit one that relied on vibrant colours and incredible lighting to enhance fairly simple and bland environments. With a decision to stick to 30FPS refresh, the sequel is one of the best looking first-person games on console. The stunning lighting returns but this time applied to incredibly detailed and complex environments that also boast incredibly looking foliage – be it natural, demon-infested or radiant neon holograms. When first encountering a new environment, I spent my time exploring every nook and sometimes just sat back to soak in the beautiful, atmospheric visuals. The audio and soundtrack remains as good if not better than the original, ramping up the music during combat and ensuring every sword slash, bullet impact, or explosion feels impactful and satisfying. Most voice actors have returned for the sequel and the fake East Asian accents, combined with idiotic dialogue, remain entertaining rather than offensive.


You’ll spot some texture pop-in and shimmering on distant scenery but every location had at least one moment where I'd come to a stop and just admire how damn good the game looked.

As with the narrative flow, presentation also suffers from repetitive world design. The first time you start off battling in a forest, before traveling up a devastated highway, then enter a suburban town, is an impressive moment that highlights the excellent technology powering the game and early impression stick with me. Unfortunately, the second time I trekked through the same set of assets, it lost some impact. The third and fourth visits, I simply rushed to my targets, ignoring any side paths or nearby chests. The primary quests and some side quests generally do a good job of stitching together interesting parts of these huge maps but subsequent visits reduced them to long slogs through an indistinct background. With the exception of primary quests, even the secrets are randomly placed in maps, often in arbitrary locations that made hunting for them repetitive and unexciting.

For all my complaints about the mission structure and repetitive semi-randomised maps, I never once stopped playing thanks to excellent gunplay, and fun upgrade system, and just enough narrative to keep me interested. It is always difficult for developers to create decent narrative in these games and the story in Shadow Warrior 2 seems more ambitious than the game can effectively convey. If you’re a fan of the original, you’ll still get a ridiculous continuation of the story of Lo Wang, but be prepared for a short learning curve as you get used to the map-based mission structure, lower framerate and upgrade-focused mechanics. For those looking for a fun looter-shooter in the same vein as Borderlands, the game is a much shorter experience with a narrower scope but the combat, whether wielding gun or sword, is far more entertaining and visceral. Shadow Warrior 2 is not a conventional sequel, and there have been some compromises getting it running on console, but it is a better game overall.