Shadow Warrior 2

[Art Blade]

Damn. Now I need to write it all again. No auto-save function while editing.. some weird accident caused probably my backspace key not to delete a letter but to go backwards one page. Half an hour out the window, great.. So, notepad, start writing and saving there and then copy-paste it back in here. // OK done. The new article took a while longer to compose and it grew a lot longer, too. I hope you're still going to read it -- I tried to make it worthwhile

SHADOW WARRIOR 2

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You may have noticed below my avatar where it reads "currently playing" that I play this game. I know that D_B knows because some time ago he accidentally clicked something on steam and by that asked me to watch me playing, so I streamed my gameplay to him. Due to his internet connection it was more like a slide show but I believe he kind of liked the game

What is SW2?

Generally speaking, a First Person Shooter. Simple and good like back in the old days. But with today's graphics and all that Very nice map locations of very different style and looks. Procedurally generated as in they stitch some map chunks together so it always looks familiar but is never the same. Replayability is high because of the aforementioned procedurally generated maps (not getting old that way) and because the story is simple and fun to play through. It is one out of five games that I got 100% of the achievements for, I love this game.

OK, so a first person shooter, yes, from the look-and-see, although you've got tons of swords and other weapons, too. I think 72 different base weapons that on top can be customised. I prefer swords, the katana in particular. This game actually does what other games have never managed to do: the sword cuts where you aim it at. If you go for the head, you'll decapitate an enemy. Arms and legs or the belly? Dismemberment and disembowelment is actually working. You can cut enemies to chunks albeit not to ribbons 

SW2 reminds me of Quake, Doom and DukeNukem3D regarding the gore and that you fight monsters. The "toilet humour" jokes and other funny lines provided exclusively by a macho narcissistic ninja type of modern warrior by the name of Lo Wang (the player character) particularly remind me of Duke Nukem. Simple, mindless pure fun. Hack and slash and kill 'em all. It reminds a little of Borderlands regarding weapons (additionally, character loadout) as the game allows for a lot of different weapons through a MASSIVE amount of different types of gems that can be used in up to four slots per weapon as well as armour slots and the likes of your character. I'll go into detail a little later. It is virtually impossible to find two players with identical stats or two otherwise identical looking weapons with the same stats.

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The game provides a singleplayer and an up to four players co-op mode. It is in a way open world but the world is composed of comparatively huge maps that are story-related. You teleport to a mission and back, even during missions you can teleport to your base where shops and mission givers are located. During and after the game most maps of completed missions will stay open and available for free roam so you can teleport there and back at any time. Enemies will grow back every time you load the game so you can keep on free-roaming in those maps. You are not forced to play through, you can free-roam in between. There are at LEAST 50 secrets to be found, which is very much like doom and the likes used to be. Like, looking for secret doors in walls and all that.

Missions are simple. Basically go some place, kill everyone and come back, get a new mission. How you do it and when, up to you. Once you're in the mission map, you can do what you want, free roam, and eventually kill or pick up stuff, depending on what the mission wants you to do.

There are four difficulty levels. Something that equals easy, normal, hard and.. "insane." Insanity difficulty is special. You may start a game on insanity tier 1. There are, however, seven (7!) tiers of insanity. The higher tiers, starting at T2 and rank 30, require an increase of 20 ranks to unlock. Like this: T1 from 1 to 30+, T2 from 31 to 51+, until T7 at 131+. The higher the difficulty level (including insanity tiers) the more damage you will take, the more armour the enemies will have and so on, it really is impossible to play "just like that" on higher tiers. Before I got the knack of it all, I tried a T7 co-op because I had high enough a rank. First thing I noticed was that enemies apparently didn't take ANY damage from whatever weapon I was so proud of. Until then those weapons were pretty cool on normal and hard.. I now knew I needed to improve a lot, but how? The next thing I noticed was that basically a butterfly would kill me just by bumping into me. Crazy. Or more like, INSANE. And I noticed that the other three players basically did one hit, one kill. Like a white-glowing axe would go through a block of butter. INSANE.

OK, so how the flipping heck does that w0#k? The answer is customisation.

Here the details I said I'd go into later. The customisations are key to success. You need gems, most of all. Gems are items that fallen enemies will drop, you can also find them in treasure chests shown on your mini map or by free-roaming as they are also if sparsely scattered around in the open world. You can also craft a new more or less random gem out of three gems that you've already got. And you can buy them in two shops at your base. Shops also have got weapons for sale and some type of cards for abilities that you can spend your XP on. It's for instance a card that allows you to carry more ammo. They usually have four or five levels, you spend your XP points on them as you see fit. You earn XP by killing enemies. One XP point also means rank up one. So rank is not a sign of skill or strength but a sign of how much of a killer you are However, usually strength comes with XP and that usually helps develop or hone your skills. If you're not skilled, make yourself strong as in armoured like a bloody tank. You can use crowd control abilities and big weapons like rocket launchers to deal with hordes of enemies. If you're skilled, do whatever you want 

Back to gems: Gems come in four flavours. White, blue, yellow and orange. White being the common (almost useless, the newbie stuff) and orange the legendary ("cool") stuff, blue and yellow in between those. Gems have levels. The higher the level, the stronger the effect. Simply put, you want high-level orange gems. High level means 200+. I met players who didn't even know levels could go beyond 150. And that is what's interesting about the game. A gem's level depends on the difficulty level you play on. Play on easy and get low level stuff (still white to orange) With that you will at best be able to kill the weakest enemy on insanity T1 with a lot of fighting and probably just as well a lot of dying involved. You see, it pays off to play on higher difficulty levels because the loot is better by default. I can see that you may disagree. Like, I don't want to play on insanity, I'm fine with an easy game. That's OK, you can do that.

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Now something that makes this game interesting. Once you finished the game, say on easy or normal, you'll have three options. One, continue the character and the now open world free roam game without missions. Two, keep that character AND start a new game with a new character. You can switch between two characters but they will never be in the same game world. And the best one, three: start over and KEEP everything you've got: all weapons, your rank, everything. Just start a new game with the old character. Which means, you can now either start a new playthrough on the same difficulty level or try your luck on a higher difficulty level and improve your character. You're not naked anymore. You can keep doing that, either playing through again on the same difficulty or going through the different higher difficulty levels by starting over after each playthrough. You can always keep your stronger-growing character. Cool.

So that's how you grow stronger, among other things. I did something in between. I started on normal and played through several times until I finished on insanity T1. I keep my game like that, after a playthrough with now open end. When I want to play missions, I just join other players for co-op online who play story missions. I can also choose which difficulty level I want when joining a co-op game. I can join any co-op game that I want. When I "return" to my game, I am back at where I left, status after the game, everything unlocked, but I keep the stuff I collected during co-op. And, you can change the difficulty at any time. So I can change between those tiers. T7 for crafting, T1 for easy free roam and so on.

Back to customisation. Each gem, no matter the colour, will have random stats but also it will belong to a specific group (there are a fair bit of those) or type, not sure what to call it. It means, there are gems for weapons and for your character and within those two groups there are lots of sub-groups. Weapon gems can for instance increase the damage (that you deal) of your weapon or turn a handheld minigun into a stand-alone turret that you can drop as a "little helper." It is fun -- you slash and hack the enemy from the back who is looking at the turreted gun shooting at him.  Other weapon gems can add elemental effects or explosive ammo and so on. There is fire, ice, toxin and electricity. Toxic is fun because there are toxic corpse explosions that can take out other enemies  Electric shocks can render enemies stunned.. lots of fun. Ice too, frozen enemies, SHATTER 'EM  Each gem can have up to three characteristics, the third one will always be a negative, unwanted characteristic. You can remove the unwanted characteristic but that costs a lot of rare orbs.. what that is, in a moment. And there are gems with just two and only positive characteristics. I think you can already imagine that the game offers virtually endless combinations of all types of gems and all that.

There is even more, Orbs of Masamune.. special and rare, usually payment for missions (additionally to money) or dropped by champions (massive special enemies) or rewards for trials. Trials are basically arena fights. Not waves of enemies but around 40 at once. Kill them all without dying and you get orbs as reward. They can be repeated at any time and as often as you like for grinding orbs. Again, the higher the difficulty level of your base game, the more orbs or money as payment.. For instance, a trial on easy or normal difficulty rewards you with something like 3 or 5 or so orbs. On insanity T5 it's 47 orbs. Right now, for the last stage of damage increase (additional to the base damage) for my katana that can be achieved with orbs, I need some 3,500 orbs to increase the damage from +16% to +19%. Isn't that insane The earlier stages weren't that expensive. They got exponentially more expensive, though.

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So.. the game is made in a way that you have reason to continue playing and to play on ever higher difficulty levels until you can breeze through a T7 game.

I'm now well capable of playing T5, did the hardest trial (centre one, for those who know) which basically is a boss fight against two really tough enemies, together with another guy about my rank (300+) we played one after another until I ended up with over 2,000 orbs. I think I'm about to get there, won't be that long anymore until I can play T7 with ease. I am still a little afraid, remembering my first time on T7. But I am good enough now to teach other players how to improve, just like some other high ranking players taught me when I had no clue about how to do stuff right in order to grow strong. By comparison, one blow of my katana usually deals 2,050 damage (critical hit chance 85% and critical hit bonus 1,414%) but only around 135 without crit. A normal sword deals perhaps 80 damage. But I've seen my katana do 10,000+ with special attacks  That.. kills an average enemy on T5 with one blow. So.. I know high ranking players who were happy when they dealt 800 or 1,000. Now they're on a mission to get that sorted out If you watch the review vid below, you'll notice that the player hardly ever gets close to 100 damage per shot/hit. Clearly a beginner 

When I was a newbie to playing on insanity (I had only played on normal and hard, a lot) and dared to join those guys playing T7, I was gobsmacked. I told them I felt like a total newbie (despite my rank of somewhere around or under 200) and that my weapons didn't do ANY damage. They allowed me to stay. "Try not to die," they said. I turned invisible (a power you achieve) and stayed invisible all the time so enemies wouldn't see me. All I did was pick up the gems the T7-enemies dropped. You need to know that every player gets their own gems, you're not "stealing" from other players. I was in collector's heaven Man, the loot that I got.. amazing. I was again gobsmacked to see the power (stats) of that stuff. I thanked those guys profusely -- I mean, I couldn't support them, yet they allowed me that I picked the cherries One of them said to me -- I will never forget that -- sensing that I was between sadness and frustration and amazement,

"your time will come, Art Blade."

They were right. And I think it is very close.

Tips for the pros:

- Only use the anvil on T7 as the results will be much better (higher levels) You can still go back to a lower tier to play and return to T7 for more crafting.
- The anvil is strongest after the final mission is over. So that and T7 combined will result in the best quality.
- only combine gems of the same type (i.e. 3x elemental weapon gems) so the result will be of the same type, too
- focus on critical chance and critical bonus. Both for weapons and your armour. These two categories will combine and add up.
- don't embed elemental gems. Embed crit and damage as they're neutral. That way, you can always change the elemental type but maintain the power.

And at the very end, here two vids for you.




Edited out some typos and added some content I thought should still be in there.

[PZ]

Dang that's too bad that you lost all your w0#k AB; I've been there myself. There is a mod called "Drafts" that adds a button next to the Post button allowing one to save a draft of a post to w0#k on it later. The author has not updated the mod to the current version of the forum, but I think they are working on it. We can install that mod to allow us to save drafts.

As to your post - well done! +1 

I personally do not like sword play, and can hardly stand the monsters in FC3 and 4 so the game is not for me.  However, I like to vicariously game through you by reading posts like this 

[fragger]

+1 from me too, Art That was quite an exhaustive rundown! Thanks for taking the trouble - twice

I might think about that one, although I'm not a huge sword guy either. I like the idea of the game's design philosophy though. Should be more games built along those sort of lines, open-ended with lots of replay value and what looks to be a hugely configurable upgrade system.

[Art Blade]

thanks, guys

It is NOT a sword game. But you can make it one.

Take a look at the still of the first video (the review, actually, WATCH IT  ) -- you can already SEE a bow, a mini gun, dual wielded SMGs..
Which reminds me, there is a gem for dual wielding that you can put into say, a pistol. And an amulet for dual wielding assault rifles if you want to go in like Rambo

There are only 12 swords out of 72 weapons. I think even 73, they added an assault rifle recently.

You have a selection of pistols, shotguns, assault rifles, SMGs, Gatling guns, rocket launchers, grenade launchers, bows, rail guns, nail guns, some special weapons (weird stuff like claws), and various saws (as in chain saws, they appear in both videos)

Your personal weapons loadout is a weapon wheel with 8 weapons available at any time and you may change that loadout at ANY time. Your character's stats (gems, amulet) can be focussed on the use of say, medium firearms but is not limited to it. You may have a preference but you're not limited to it. There are also a few special powers that you can boost with your gems in the character menu. Powers like a chi push (blast wave) or summon massive spikes that impale enemies for some time, rendering them defenceless for some time, you can turn invisible for some time, heal yourself, and the "shadow fury" ability that basically lets you go berserk big time. You may change your character's abilities via the player menu at ANY time. Yes, even during missions you can change everything.

You see.. there are only 20 blades out of 72 weapons so I'm quite confident that you'd find something you like among the remaining 52.

[fragger]

I did get that from the pics and clips, but it's good to know that you don't have to go the Kill Bill route if you don't want too Cheers.

About long posts, I've gotten into the habit of going into Word if I realise I'm starting to get into War And Peace territory with the length of a post If it looks like going that way, I'll get out of here, go into Word, do my blathering there and then cut-and-paste back into here. I can save repeatedly from Word, which I can't do here, and which is good insurance should a power outage occur mid-compose (which has happened to me )

[Art Blade]

I didn't know it was going to be somewhat lengthy. I wanted to give a short rundown of the game as I expected it wouldn't interest anyone anyway but since I have been playing it for months now, I felt I should post about it.

It WAS short at first, it still took half an hour. And then the accident. When I started anew using notepad, I think that I got carried away a bit Hell, I even thought I had pasted the text twice 

[Dweller_Benthos]

Interesting, and a bit more complex than the original version, which I played so long ago. But I do remember the humor and the personality of Lo Wang, but not much else from the game.

Yeah, since I never do much in the friends menu in Steam, I was looking for something else (forget now really) and saw the spectate game option and clicked it without thinking, then realizing that would require a bit of internet speed I don't have.

[Art Blade]

there are three SW games. The original that you remember from 1997 is the one I never played. I'm not even sure that I actually remember the name from back then or only due to the vast amount of info I came across playing both sequels. So, what is now referred to as Shadow Warrior is a reboot of the 1997 game of the same name, I call it SW1 because the sequel that this topic is about deals with Shadow Warrior 2 (SW2) that actually is the only SW game with an Arabic numeral behind its title.

[Dweller_Benthos]

OK, now I'm confused, but no big, happens all the time.

[PZ]

 

[Art Blade]

hehe 

Yesterday I decided to start a new playthrough on insanity2 (aka T2) and I asked a steam friend whether he wanted to join. "If you play on T3, I'm in, " he said. Well, I set it to T3 and we started co-op together. About two hours into the game, we were about 50% through with the story, already. Kinda breezed through, so easy..  We're going to continue the playthrough today I suppose. I feel so overpowered on T3 it's almost embarrassing. 

My shotgun with ice damage freezes over an enemy and blows it to shattering pieces at the same time. A horde of enemies? Whip out my turreted minigun and it had barely spun up when the enemies were already dead. I can just sit back and watch that thing do the fighting for me.  My pistol takes out small armoured enemies with just one shot that deals an electro shock plus damage from the explosive ammo.. big enemy? Just one shot, and the fizzling sparking enemy is locked up in his own electrified body. If they haven't died, all they can do is follow my sword with their eyeballs when they get hacked to chunks the size of a cow. OH YES 

[Art Blade]

OH.. by the way, PZ, "not a sword guy?" What about Assassin's Creed.. it isn't so different. You have a sword, and other weapons. Hidden blades, some fire arms.. so.. your choice what you actually use, same with SW2.

[PZ]

I thought of that, but I found the environment and Ezio in the AC series was what mostly drew me to those games so I was willing to overlook swords and knives. I still play AC2 at times, but never AC3 other than the first time (never did finish the game) - Brotherhood was also good and I played it at least a couple of times through - Revelations is one I would likely get for the PC if the price falls enough even though not in Italy (at least it has Ezio). 
However, when the venue/main character changed from Italy/Ezio, I quickly lost much of my interest, like in the pirate series which I also did not care for much (never finished those). I did finish the one in France, but mostly because the map was so small and mission list so short I ran out of things to do before becoming bored. I started the one in England, but stopped after a while, and never completed that one either. 

But mostly, the largest deal breaker for me in just about any game is monsters - I can't stand boss fights and the chaotic action that those kinds of games require - can't stand button (or mouse) mashing either, which I always seem to do when attempting those - watching the game play in SW2 brought back bad memories of the stupid boss missions in the Far Cry series. 

[Art Blade]

I'm usually not a fan of monsters either (zombies are worse for me) but the way you finish them in SW2 is just too much fun to be missed Same with boss fights, I think SW2 is the only game they're different because while they don't change their specs within a certain difficulty, you can. It means that you can grow stronger than them.

Today we continued with our T3 playthrough (50% was a bit too optimistic a guess, it was 42%, and I believe it was more like 3 hours rather than 2) and after one boss fight (I remember how proud I was after a lengthy battle to have won it on insanity T1 singleplayer) both of us had to laugh. "Crazy," he commented it. Why? It took literally just a few seconds. After that, we upped the difficulty to T4. Now fights last a few seconds longer..

[PZ]