There’s Always Room for Wang
Wang is back baybee!! Granted, he literally was just here last year but he has returned in Shadow Warrior 3: Definitive Edition, which is basically an update for the game which includes a new Survival Mode and a Horde Mode which unlocks after players complete the campaign. As well as a few new arenas and new weapon skins and for those on console this will also be the ‘Next-Gen’ update. For anyone who already owns the base copy of Shadow Warrior 3 this will be a free upgrade which is a really nice thing to do in this economy, don’t you think? Now I already reviewed Shadow Warrior 3 when it came out last year and I enjoyed it, and the full review can be found here but for this I will just go over the new things that are in the Definitive Edition, hold on to your butts.
MSRP: $
Platforms: PC (reviewed), Xbox, PlayStation
Price I’d Pay: $29.99
First up if this is your first time with Shadow Warrior 3 it plays differently from the sequel. SW3 plays more like a raunchy version of the latest Doom iteration complete with bloody chunks of Japanese demons and all the sideways humor a guy named Wang can throw at you. It’s not a bad game at all, I would have liked something more akin to what they did with Shadow Warrior 3 but I digress, one of the first things that is new in the Definitive Edition is the new arenas. It’s exactly as it sounds; players will be dropped into a stage filled with various enemies and will need use all of their weapons including Lo Wang’s awesome katana sword to eliminate the demons as fast as possible. Each enemy is worth points, and using different weapons to eliminate your foes as well as the gory finishing moves will help to multiply the score.
While the new content certainly is nice, and adds some extra replay value to a game that can be complete in about 5 hours; it still just doesn’t feel like enough. The story is fun and comical and the arenas are cool but what players have been begging for is multiplayer. Why they took the co-op function out of the game when it was so much fun in Shadow Warrior 2 is beyond me, and almost every other fan of the game that I have spoken to. Well sadly this ‘Definitive Edition’ still has not righted that wrong and as it stands Shadow Warrior 3 is still a single player game. While this update seems to have fixed most of the gameplay issues I had with the game, its really sad to see that adding co-op or even a vs multiplayer wasn’t in the cards.
While this is dubbed as the Definitive Edition, I just don’t see how it can be called such when it’s still missing a lot of what made Shadow Warrior 1 and 2 so good. It being a free update for current players is certainly amazing and lowering the price of the game for newcomers is always welcome, but it still doesn’t make this a great game. Shadow Warrior 3 ends up being just ‘ok’ in the grand scheme of things and especially in comparison to the games around it. Lo Wang deserves better and if the fates will it we will get to hang out with our pal Wang again soon.
Review copy of game provided by publisher.