Shadow Warrior 3

It's better than the first, but less freedom than the second. The excessive complexity of the second was ill received and they decided to abandon it. The game is short and they opted for a pure linear game. No secondary routes or hub city. It's back to the classic linear sequence of levels of old games. People compare it to doom eternal because every encounter is some arena style combat. In any game I'm not a fan of tying the level up and skill points to "kill 50 with headshot, kill 30 with fire, etc". I very much prefer plain "kill and gain XP".

They reworked their graphics and art. At last they removed the excessive bloom. Removed the fog and went for a cartoon style for the enemies. The enemies are all fantasy and cool. The absence of fog leaves the environment clearer. The UI has the touch of an artist, but it feels much much worse than the art style of the previous game. I don't know what happened, maybe they outsourced it to somebody else? The bold subtitles in what appears to be Times New Roman typeface are plain terrible to read.

Who had this idea of making the ammo pick ups a blue ideogram? It took me the whole game to see that there was a small ammo pick up inside the ideogram. I call this another design mistake, because in the previous games the ideograms were always associated with magical powers. Breaking the pattern creates confusion. Throughout the game I really thought that the blue ideogram was a mana pick up, as in many RPGs. This is a great example of art that confuses the player.

The level design went for a completely linear experience. So much emphasis on a linear route that they made rides on rails sections. The grappling hook, jumps and wall jumps are at least fun. In the previous games you had secondary routes which would house secrets for instance. Now they've completely abandoned them. In spite of linear levels, I got lost multiple times. It's the same mistake that happens in games such as Mirror's Edge. The path to follow is outside the player's view. That or there are things on screen which deceive you by pointing at a wrong direction.

Another design mistake relates to the skills. The spike traps are meant for special kills. I missed this mechanic in the entire game because the tutorial had a message on screen telling about it, but I missed it. It was caused by the combination of the action on screen driving my attention away from reading the subtitle and the fact that the text remains for a short amount of time. In Crysis 2 there is a tutorial message that reads "the stealth meter", but they forgot to tell which meter on screen is the stealth one. It may sound stupid, but details like this can often confuse the player. The same thing happened in SW3 and this is why I played the whole game never understanding the special kills with gory weapons to its fullest. I completely missed the on screen meter of it. The first boss. The last phase requires you to jump and climb up to the highest ground there. Except that you have to use the grappling hook on the boss and the objective marker is so small that I couldn't see it. I wasted time in that battle falling down multiple times to the lowest ground without understanding what to do.

The worst part of this game are the dialogues. Who wrote them? Humor which isn't funny. The game also has many bugs. If you die in the middle of a dialogue, it doesn't continue. Or you go back to the last checkpoint and the dialogue loses sync with the game. I can understand that Lo Wang displays a immature nature, which combined with Hoji's childish plans and a spoiled brat attitude form a pair with synergy. Personally, for me it was annoying.

Apart from desync subtitles bug, there are tons of others. Near the end of the game there is rails segment where you have to ride a sliding rocky plate. First it's easy to miss the timings of each jump. Second, there is a serious bug. The speed at which the character pulls the grappling hook and the speed of the rocky plate mismatches and cause the character to fall off and die. I had to close the game and restart that part. Other bugs include dying and then a door never opens, forcing you to restart the level. The music plays at low volume making it impossible to enjoy it.