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Replacing Lo’s voice actor for someone of East Asian heritage was clearly a choice made to move away from its more egregious past.

Unfortunately, Shadow Warrior 3 feels unwilling to step out of the shoes it has already outgrown. Ultimately, basic stories can still provide an interesting or thoughtful experience if done right. CREDIT: Devolver Digitalīeing simplistic isn’t an issue for a game. It’s hard to make something deeper when the source material was as shallow as a yokai-infested puddle. Ultimately, Shadow Warrior is caught between the desire to make a modern game and insistence on not losing its identity, but this becomes a problem when the identity of the game was always a stereotype. Lo Wang still spouts cheesy one-liners ripped out of bad ’90s video games, and the rampant orientalism leaves no real room for a thought out story.

Unfortunately, the writing and story achieves the opposite effect. The first hour or so leaves a striking impression that really captures why these shooters are so beloved – they are equally great to play or as a spectator sport. You are constantly moving through a slideshow of set pieces, only pausing to check over that really cool clip you just recorded. In a sense, Shadow Warrior 3 reminds me of one of those arcade rail shooters. He twirls them while leaping from platform to platform, switching weapons at a moment’s notice. Guns pack a punch both physically and visually, looking great in Lo’s hands. The gameplay is possibly the best that Shadow Warrior has ever felt: really encapsulating what people like about these games. The game immediately starts out with high-stakes action and this doesn’t stop until it’s finished four hours later. In a surprisingly great tutorial, you have to live through his failure to take the dragon down learning your moves, weapons and abilities as you go. Taking place years after the events of the second game, protagonist Lo Wang is left depressed, alone and slowly going mad after releasing a dragon on the world.

Unfortunately, Shadow Warrior 3 relies on both the best of the genre and all those things we should have left behind in the ’90s. Harking back to the days of old, it tends to describe a certain flow to the game – encapsulated by the lack of ADS and floaty fast movement. The term ‘Boomer Shooter’ is one used with love in the games industry.