Shadow Warrior 2 review

After I experienced each setting, the game became repetitive. Enemies rarely change, except that sometimes there are more of them and sometimes they’re bigger than normal. This is the main marker of progression, though players also gain access to bigger, less realistic, more powerful weapons. Wang earns skill points, which acquire new abilities and upgrade them. Slain enemies also drop upgrades, which may be equipped to enhance weapons’ damage or give them elemental effects.

Upgrades are one of the few ways levels are spiced up, since the user can play around with different builds to find the most effective weapons and try out different combinations in co-op mode, where up to four players can play through the missions. It’s one of the few ways to get enjoyment out of the game. However, aside from the occasional boss battle that might require a different strategy, each approach is the same: point and shoot.

Upon realizing that the combat wasn’t going to evolve in any meaningful way, I hoped for relief in Shadow Warrior 2’s story. I didn’t find much. Lo Wang is an ... okay protagonist. He sort of has a moral code. When one of the characters admits to raping a woman, Wang calls him a piece of shit. Wang is against fascism and rags on the people that hire him, cognizant that he’s doing dirty work for dirty people in the name of cash.

That said, and I didn’t think this was possible, Wang makes too many stupid jokes. In the last game, there was a balance between his immature sense of humor and moments when he had to be serious. In Shadow Warrior 2, Wang can’t go five seconds without cracking wise, much to the annoyance of everyone around him (and me). These jokes are bad and happen too frequently. There are only so many "oh, you said duty; I thought you said doodie" jokes I can take before it gets tired. Thanks to the horrible dialogue and the racist stereotyping, I found it impossible to connect with him as a player. This is tough considering that, you know, he’s the main character.

Kamiko doesn’t fare any better. She’s introduced as a capable woman with a scientific and archaic background, and her presence is constant. But she spends the majority of the game exasperated by Wang and serving as a plot device. She has a connection to every other character, but because she can only talk using Wang’s voice, she doesn’t get to interact with any of them. She’s there for exposition, to help Wang teleport, and to move the plot along. She has nothing else to show for herself.

Kamiko and Wang’s back-and-forth is refreshing at first, since she often repeated what I was thinking. But she isn’t given much to do other than be annoyed at him. When it actually matters, as in one moment where she withstands a particularly disturbing violation, she barely reacts. There’s no character growth either. At the end of the game, when she and Wang agree that they’re friends, it feels forced. There’s nothing in between that suggested that she was gaining a respect for him and vice versa. There was just arguing.

Any other potentially interesting story details brought into to the game are wasted. One tragic character’s selfless motivations end up destroying her, but she’s introduced halfway through the game, degraded when she makes a bad transphobic joke, and made a villain. Wang gets embroiled in god politics and the evil Zilla Corporation, all of which feels like filler — most of the game’s runtime is filled with combat and missions that have little connection to one another, which makes most of the experience useless.