REVIEW: Shadow Complex
Reviewed on Xbox 360. Developed by Chair. Published by Epic.
And so the cavalcade of great downloadables continues. Shadow Complex, by Chair, takes the beloved 2D Metroidvania gameplay and marries it to the Unreal 3 engine. The result is a triumph for gamers.
Shadow Complex sees your character traversing a secret base of a group calling themselves the Reformation. As you move between rooms you encounter enemies to fight, weapons and items to upgrade and nooks and crannies to explore. So if you like old Metroid and Castlevania games, the theory is that you will love this game to death. Well, I don’t particularly care for that style of game and have been having an absolute blast with this.
So you’re frolicking with your girlfriend in the woods when you come across this underground base and suddenly your training your dad wanted you to have makes sense and to cut a long story short insert description of Super Metroid here. So you start off with a pistol and some basic jumping and climbing abilities but you upgrade everything the more you play the game. Your pistol is replaced by successively more powerful automatic rifles, you gain grenades and other devices as a secondary weapon, your jumping and movement abilities are upgraded in various ways and of course you can search for little upgrades (such as the ability to hold more ammo of a certain type) that are dotted throughout the game. The colour pink is notorious for its exclusion from the game’s colour palette.
Combat is , of course, a big part of the game. If you’re able to get near to a foe you’ll be given the chance to melee him or of course you could just shoot them with your weapons, or blow them up or destroy an exploding object near them and listen to their cries as they fall to their death. Your movement is strictly up and down, left and right, but enemies maybe on multiple planes. The game is set up relatively well to aim at those enemies not on the same plane as you but it can sometimes be a touch finicky. Enemies range from guys in masks with pistols to guys in masks with rifles, machine guns, rocket launchers and eventually mechsuits. You will kill a lot of these and perhaps the game is a tad easy in the combat department but even so you will need 6 or more hours to complete the campaign which is pretty decent for a 1200 point game. Like HL2 there is an achievement meter so you can check on your progress towards each new achievement the game has to offer. It’s like weighing yourself before and after you go to the toilet.
The movement is very slick and the best since infamous (which was three months ago so ‘big deal’). At the start of the game there are many areas you won’t be able to access the first time you spot a hidden item, but you will likely encounter it again at some stage. Though the game expects you to backtrack and revisit areas, this only gets painful towards the very end of the game. Of course- it is quite painful at the end when the game more or less says, “hey bud, you need every upgrade.” I just want to finish the game FFS.
The visuals are nice and polished with the design very reminiscent of Metal Gear 2. It is one very pretty looking game though the cutscenes look somewhat rougher. The story is also similar though it is nowhere near as over the top as anything dreamed up by Kojima and co. Conversely, while it is well told and the voice acting is top-notch it is also not as memorable as a girl in a bikini shooting at you. The sound is also top notch, one of the best combos of music, effects and voice in any recent 2D game. I still have that save room sting going around my head. It’s almost like brain cancer, only more melodic. I long for amnesia.
So a 1200 point game that will take easily 6-8 hours to complete and is fun to boot? We need more of these, stat! Of course, we do have an actual 2D Metroid game coming from Team Ninja soon so that should fill the gap for many. In the mean time, I have to work my way to the last boxx battle and finish this thing. Huzzah!
Controller1.com Rating 3/3
