-
Source: Gamefreaks -
Related
Publisher: EA
Platforms: PlayStation 3, Xbox 360
Rating: 7/10
www.gamefreaks.co.nz
Shadows of the Damned wears the pedigree of its developers on its blood-splattered, studded, purple-leather sleeve. This unholy union of Shinji Mikami (Resident Evil) and Goichi Suda (Killer7, No More Heroes) does its level best to support Suda51's singular punk-rock stylings with the robust combat mechanics that the self-aware maverick's earlier titles lacked. Even if the combat feels a little dated, and tonally it does not charm or alarm as much as earlier Grasshopper Manufacture games, Shadows of the Damned still has buckets more personality than most action games and, this time, has the solid gameplay to back it up.
I can speculate, a bit, about some of the possible reasons why Shadows' writing and style do not pack quite the absurd, vibrantly visceral, utterly new punch of something like No More Heroes. Perhaps it's because the satanic visual tropes in the game's art direction are not that distant from your bog-standard death metal album cover. It might be that Garcia Hotspur (The game's protagonist) is too transparently designed to be super-cool, with his gravelly Mexican accent and skin wallpapered with tattoos, while Travis Touchdown (No More Heroes' pseudo light-sabre wielding lead) - who plasters his room with anime and pro. Wrestling collectables - is basically just a dweeb.
On the other hand, the fact that Hotspur's demon foes reside in a perfectly functional human-like city, with demon-advertisements and demon-vending machines - but it's also just full of piles of mutilated corpses and creepy red-muck because I suppose demons enjoy those things - is undeniably cool. Garcia, and his constant companion Johnson (A former-demon floating skull who speaks in an eloquent British accent and polymorphs into the Garcia's entire armory.), stride around Suda51's vision of the underworld in an incredibly nonchalant way punctuated by every conceivable phallus-joke. The humour is juvenile yes, but Garcia's tendency to not fully appreciate what's going on, and the way it plays off Johnson's quick-wittedness, is always endearing.
Your eight hour trek through Hades will mostly be spent dealing to hordes of mummified looking emaciated demon-zombies. Encounters play out like a more mobile version of Resident Evil 4's stand-and-shoot mechanic, with the camera zooming to an over-the-shoulder view when the left trigger is held to aim, but Shadows of the Damned is absolutely not a horror game. Enemies dart and lunge towards you more than in the Mikami directed survival horror sequel, but Garcia can respond by dodge-rolling in four directions, and by moving, albeit slowly, while looking down the site of his gun - a feat RE4's Leon Kennedy never accomplished. Ammo, also, is not scarce, allowing you to spray the battlefield with munitions to your heart's content.
The game skillfully introduces new enemy types and armaments throughout its course, and you can remove limbs to expectable consequences as much as you like, but the combat still kind of feels like it's from five years ago, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. The movement animations of Garcia, and to a lesser extent his enemies, feel stiff, and the game's badass Mexican protagonist does not show much of a reaction to saw blades spinning into him other a momentary doubling over and a splash of blood. You wont die much at all from the core combat sections either, (I died in battle maybe three or four times on normal mode in the entire game) so the fighting is fast paced, arcady, viscerally satisfying, low-consequence demon hunting.
I added the "from the core combat sections" caveat because you will fail in Shadows of the Damned, a fair few times in fact, at each instance the game asks you to do something other than blast demons. In an unnecessary attempt to change up the pace a bit (The game does a brilliant job evolving its simplistic combat.) you will occasionally spend time running away in odd sections that the game's movement controls were never designed for. Once the game even wedges you into a series of "sniper" segments that are about twelve times as long as they have any right to be, with only one type of enemy and endlessly recycled environments. Any time the game deviates from its core it starts to feel uninspired, repetitive and frustrating.
Shadows of the Damned commit one real crime. And it's pretty serious one considering the history of Suda51 games and his eye for set pieces: The boss battles are pretty plain.
Each one starts out with promise. You will encounter illustrated children's (Or, more accurately, demon-children's) books in the world that are as clever and creative as they are depraved. These stories that form the background of the game's bosses are where the writing reaches its absurd zenith, with both Garcia and Johnson adding their own hilarious laconic commentary.
It's a shame then, that when you finally reach the bosses that they are pretty much just very big animals, with the kind of tedious, almost lazy death metal album cover oh-so-dark aesthetic. And also you get to fight death I guess. Three times.
Mechanically they are reminiscent of the final dungeon encounters in a Legend of Zelda game, In that defeating them is about understanding a puzzle more than it is about out maneuvering your opponent. Unfortunately, In Shadows of the Damned the bosses/puzzles are really inelegant, which mostly stems from the fact that the ubiquitous "blatantly obvious weak point" is the same no matter which boss you are fighting, and is even scattered liberally as a point to destroy in environmental puzzles. It's exactly the same shiny red sphere, or very occasionally a different bright red geometric shape, on the body of every single boss you encounter.
To clumsily counter that banal simplicity the game makes it extremely unclear whether or not you have found the solution. Shadows of the Damned employs ludicrously long, totally invisible health bars in every boss battle. Often I would be standing still, blasting away at the super-obvious weakness of my enormous foe, wondering if the puzzle really was that mindless. The fights are never properly difficult - all the giant monsters are dim enough to vaguely bat Garcia around with their feet or shoot projectiles rather than take advantage of their huge size - so the game must feel as though it needed the ludicrous length of each fight to supply some kind of substance. There's no excuse for a game that is, in every other instance so conscious of its gaminess, to not use health bars. But even if it had them, they would still be too vast.
Welcome a world where demons love to eat eyes, brains and strawberries. A world where the only true sources of light are animated goat-head candelabras. A world with a really, really fantastic soundtrack by Silent Hill composer Akira Yamaoka. I feel as though Shadows of the Damned's style isn't quite as special as killer7 or No More Heroes but, then again, I don't really know why I feel that way which is probably why I'm not in Goichi Suda's position. Adding consistently robust combat into the auteur's game design recipe was extremely sensible. It's simple, yes, but perhaps that is exactly what was appropriate to not detract from Shadows' personality. Add back in the remarkably creative boss battles from earlier Grasshopper Manufacture efforts and we might just have something truly spectacular on our hands.
