Every fight won carries a danger of triggering Wang-based innuendo. Lo Wang thinks you should clip that last headshot. In seven hours, I heard Lo Wang yell hashtags hundreds of times. From first cutscene to end credits, any small success is punished by having to hear Lo Wang's god-awful banter, multiple times a minute. Of course, by this point, Lo Wang has already spent hours making the experience as unbearable as possible. By the end of the game, every combat encounter is a bloated slog of bullet sponge enemies that drags on for ten minutes or more. Shadow Warrior 3 doesn't have any better ideas for ramping up difficulty beyond throwing out ever higher numbers of its beefy demons, and the addition of two clunky boss fights doesn’t help.

Each fight started testing my patience, even with the variety provided by platforming sequences that break up the march of combat arenas. The single finisher animation for each enemy type means the gruesome novelty is short-lived it’s not long before pushing the execution button feels like slamming the brakes. Character and weapon upgrades eventually make HP and ammo drops a reliable constant, flattening the rhythm of in-combat decision-making. It’s a fun balance to find, while it lasts.Īs the hours progress, the momentum crumbles. Of course, that meant there were more bodies around to trip up my combat acrobatics. It produces some enjoyable tension between competing impulses-while carving through waves of yokai, I’d spare a handful of low-tier demons to harvest for ammo or finisher bonuses as necessary.

Shadow Warrior 3's idea of Japan is an unbroken sea of pagodas and Buddha statues. Larger, tougher enemies will instead provide a “gore tool”: a temporary, high-damage weapon refashioned from a gruesome piece of the yokai’s corpse, like a hammer made from an oni’s meaty lower spine section. Those finishers provide an extra strategic layer: the most basic enemies will grant quick bonuses like temporary increases to maximum health, or a freeze grenade in the form of an icy slab of yokai brain matter. The shotgun’s carnage can, admittedly, be hard to parse.

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