Shadow Warrior 3 Review

ign.com:

Shadow Warrior 3 doesn’t beat around the bush. In an era where games feel like they keep trying to be bigger, this one is happy not to draw itself out with lengthy dialogue or exposition-filled cutscenes. Instead, it throws you into the action right away and rarely lets a moment of ease set in from there. And while that focus on fun is refreshing, Shadow Warrior 3 is almost completely unremarkable in its execution, being about as straightforward as an FPS can get. It might not offer many new ideas, and its protagonist may be unbearable to listen to, but sometimes solid movement and satisfying weapons is all you really need.

Picking up a good while after Shadow Warrior 2, a massive dragon is wreaking havoc across Earth and it’s up to our returning hero, Lo Wang, to destroy the lizard. For Shadow Warrior, world-ending stakes like these aren’t anything new, but it didn’t take long for me to stop paying too much attention to Shadow Warrior 3’s story. Once you start playing it you might do the same, because it's generally a rushed load of nonsense. But you don’t play Shadow Warrior for the story – you play it to shoot demons, and there’s certainly plenty of shooting to do.

From the get-go, Shadow Warrior 3 makes clear that it wants to be exciting more than anything else. Its very first fights take place on the back of that Earth-threatening dragon, which you run and jump across like an action movie hero. It generally doesn’t slow down from there either, and that breakneck pace is probably for the best. If you were given the opportunity to stop and think about what was happening, you might end up asking questions like “how did Lo Wang survive in a ramshackle shack on top of a mountain?” or “why did this dragon get so big when