Shadow Warrior 2 surprising amount of fun

So shadow warrior was a remake of an earlier duke 3d based game that was swords and guns and piles of gore.

Shadow warrior 2 is more of the same but adds in a load of weapons and a gem's system to augment and change the abilities and damage of the weapons.

It's an FPS and you can chose between melee and guns, melee has various moves you can do vortex where you spin in place hitting multiple enemies and then strike which you hit one enemy with focused damage. You also have various chi abilities vanish where you go invisible for a short time, healing, chi blast a sort of force push, and nightmare spikes which burst up from the floor impaling enemies. You also have this fast dodge move you can do to skip around out of range of people.

It has as much gore as the previous one with limbs and chunks of bodies getting cut off or blown off and fights are usually frantic.

The story is ten seconds of stuff about demons and then two hours of dick jokes.

The upgrade system of gems and new weapons works pretty well most of the gems add more damage or faster reload or elemental effects (more advanced enemies have resistances and vulnerabilities so picking the right elemental damage type makes fights a lot easier) there are a couple of specialist gems which change the way things behave one makes the gun a turret so when you fire it you drop it and it starts firing on its own. Various modifications to explosives like sticky or remote detonating things like Dual wield or charge shot.

It keeps things interesting and the number of gems is large most enemies drop a couple so much that towards the end I wasn't even really looking at most of the simple gems just swapping them out for newer higher level ones and then picking special effects or elemental types as needed.

The sheer number of weapons is also something that keeps things interesting most missions reward you with a weapon or a choice of weapon some enemies drop weapons you can sometimes find weapons in chests and you can also buy weapons at the vendors in the hub world. There are multiple types the list expanding as you play by then end I think I had something like 10 different classes of weapons and in each class 4 or 5 different types and the selection is varied with the standard pistols and rifles but also bows and nailguns and for melee swords and claws but also chainsaws. The game has a standard wheel of weapons to pick from it also has hot keys to switch quickly to your last two melee weapons and last two ranged weapons.

It means you can swiftly switch between weapons during a fight (which is good as it gets hectic in most fights) to pick the right sort of damage or just for preference.

The game also has a card based skill system you get skill points as you go and also get or can buy cards which offer certain skills or bonuses like faster movement a second wind type ability for if you get killed (if you can kill an enemy in some time frame you come back to life) or more health better damage for certain elements etc.

It makes for a fun engaging game full of crazy battles with lots of monsters and robots. The graphics are pretty good and the levels are generated procedurally with a couple of themes (one rural sort of feudal japanese, one technological neon future city, one sort of urban) you have pretty good freedom of movement with double jump and the rush move allowing you to get around quickly get up on buildings and ledges.

It's a fun game of just blasting and hacking away at various demons