Resident Evil on crack. For the most part this sums up Shadows of the Damned - a game that seems to have emerged from the blue (or maybe the depths of hell). This is a title with character, and if there's one thing I like it's games with character. Shadows of the Damned focuses around the Mexican demon hunter named Garcia Hotspur who is assisted by a british-voiced demon skull called Johnson who changes into a variety of guns (and even a motorbike at one point). The demon lord Fleming (who seems to love his phalic-related jokes) steals Garcia's beloved Paula and drags her to the demon world. Garcia essentially has to take down all the demons from Hell to retrieve his girlfriend. Although on the way, Fleming has a tendency to kill her, resurrect her and kill her again for his own personal amusement. This game is unapologetically immature and grotesquely violent which some people will hate, but in my opinion this gives the game character.
For the most part the gameplay plays like Resident Evil, with movement whilst aiming, which works well when taking on the minions of hell. A Silent Hill style "Darkness" feature is thrown into the mix which slowly kills you until you find a goat that emits light and shoot it with a 'light shot'. The whole affair works pretty well, it's challenging but fun, until you get to some of the later levels. This is where I felt the game fell down and as it can become downright frustrating thanks to some 2D levels which to be honest are just not that fun. Also you do come across enemies which are covered in Darkness that cannot be hit without first firing the light shot. These enemies are sometimes outright swarmed by it, which can get extremely irritating after a while. However both of these little flaws do offer a nice change of pace and the game does make up for it when you get the "Big Boner" along with a shooting gallery style mini-game where you release your "sticky payload" over giant demons . For some SotD may take a while to get into. From the get go it can feel like gameplay-wise the game is a Resident Evil clone, but once you get into it, it becomes a challenging experience that can be particularly hard to put down. After all Resident Evil's Shinji Mikami is the Creative Producer on the game.
Boss battles are pattern based, but I never felt that they boring. You'll go up against a myriad of deranged enemies such as a Knight which excretes darkness, a bird that drops enough f-bombs to start World War 3, some female versions of Death, along with a crazy singing woman. And of course there is Fleming himself, but I will leave him for you to find out. That said the number of weapons available are limited to a pistol, a shotgun and a submachine gun, all of which Johnson can transform into. However, every boss that you dispatch drops a shiny blue gem which upgrades each of the weapons. The pistol turns into a grenade launcher which can stick explosives to the walls, the SMG slowly turns into a homing sub-machine gun which looks somewhat like Medusa's hair and the shotgun turns into another, much more powerful grenade launcher which you can use to blow up several enemies at a time and use for the bowling and pachinko mini games.
There's really not much to say about the game graphics wise. Shadows of the Damned is running on the Unreal engine, and therefore looks pretty similar to other Unreal-based games with the murky greys and browns. However it seems that Grasshopper Manufacture haven't managed to sort the texture popping that has plagued many Unreal titles in the past. Even though the look and feel of most of the bigger Demons is bad-ass, with the Demon Salesman Christopher looking like he's just escaped from a Kiss/Ozzy Osbourne hybrid album, the normal enemies do sometimes look a little bit generic.
Shadows of the Damned is a game which doesn't really require much brain power to play. Although many may dislike the game for being immature and stupidly violent, the jokes, gags and the witty one liners will genuinely make most laugh and help to make everything very light hearted - something missing from many of today's games. Shadows of The Damned is not afraid to be completely absurd and never takes itself too seriously. Even though you may get frustrated at times with the old school style Resident Evil mechanics and the annoying 2D levels, you'll just want to plough through them to get back to the main entertainment of killing masses of demons.
Shadows of the Damned Gets An Official Game-Pad: 8.5/10
Comments
RSS feed for comments to this post