Shadow Man is a cult classic I always occasionally heard about but I never heard so much buzz about it until the remaster by Nightdive that released a few years ago, I heard about how good the game was by it's cult following and now that I finally finished it, what do I think?
It's a great game but I don't think it will nesscarily an easy game for everyone to get into. If you are one of those people who can't stand it when a game tells you nothing like I mean absolutely nothing, you are going to have a bad time even by comparison to other late 90s games like say Soul Reaver, Tomb Raider and collectathon platformers like Spyro the Dragon, Shadow Man tells you nothing and trying to figure out what to do at first can be quite the daunting task. I had to use walkthroughs quite a bit before eventually getting into the game's groove and being able to play while occasionally looking up a walkthrough.
The best way of describing Shadow Man is that what if you had the aforementioned games I mentioned and combined them into one? You pretty much get this game. You got the two worlds you can traverse and having the supernatural premise and protagonist like Soul Reaver, you got collecticbles you must collect to progress like a collectathon platformer, you get linear stages with lots of switches, traps and puzzles to solve like the older Tomb Raider games and not to mention the game even has metroidvania elements where you have items you can collection that can make world traversal easier and can be used in combat like a Metroid game. Shadow Man combines all these games into one cohesive whole and at first it's not clear what you are entirely supposed to do.
That's the thing with Shadow Man, you could go into the game blind and you might get enjoyment from it but to put it simpily what you are supposed to do is kill 5 main bad guys, 4 of them are serial killers and one of them is the final boss, Legion, but in order to do that you need to collect retractors in the various levels to get to them through the Cathedral of Pain, but before you can do that you need to collect dark souls and increase your soul levels to unlock more playable levels, one to find retractors to get to the serial killers in life side and to solve a piston puzzle, two to unlock levels and some of those will give you metroidvania upgrades that makes it easier to traverse levels as well as getting game progressing items and to top it all off, you need to be able to be Shadow Man in life side in order to finish off the serial killers. This is just main gist of what you'll be doing in Shadow Man and see how it took me so long to describe all that? That's generally how many steps it will take to get to the final boss and beat the game, and like I said, it can be a daunting task.
Once I figured it all out, the game is one of the most rewarding exploration platformers from the late 90s if not ever even. The sheer act of exploring and finding cadeux, a dark soul, an item, or a new tattoo, there is just something to always find and be rewarded for your curosity.
The moment to moment level design is much like say late 90s Tomb Raider except the platforming is much more streamlined by comparison, no need to position jumps and hope you can press the interact button in time to grab a ledge, here Mike will grab ledges simpily by tapping x and shimming is done when the ledge is grabbed when Mike is close enough to it.
Platforming might be streamlined by the combat as far as this remastered version of Shadow Man is a lot better, the way Mike can strafe left to right with the left stick and camera turning is mapped to right stick makes the game feel like an early 00s game like Max Payne and Ratchet and Clank. TR's combat can be super stitled and awkward where Shadow Man feels a lot more doable and serviceable by comparison due to the aforementioned controls as well as most if not every enemy using projectile attacks where Lara has a hard time strafing and dodging enemy attacks without flipping around constantly.
Not everything about Shadow Man's combat is perfect however, the controls might be modernized, Mike can strafe backwards and there is ablity to dodge to the side to avoid enemy attacks like Max Payne and Ratchet which can feel quite jarring especially when taking accumulated damage can kill Mike pretty fast, it's a strange quirk but I slowly got used to it since the Shadow Gun slowly becomes more powerful and getting a pleathora of more items and weapons makes short work of most enemies.
That and after a certain point, the game stops throwing new enemies entirely and you'll be fighting many of the same enemy types over and over, but this is fine since the exploration aspect of Shadow Man is so well done that I can deal with okay combat, metroidvanias and exploration heavy games just need to have serviceable combat at the end of the day.
Overall, Shadow Man is a great game and but just be warned, the game doesn't tell you much on anything. Also, the game can be quite lengthy too, the game's clock and what my PS5's timer told me are very different. According to the game, I played for around 14 hours where my PS5 clock said I played for around 40 hours.
No comments:
Post a Comment