Coming into Shadows of the Damned, as much as I understand that it’s a different game, I have a strong hatred towards No More Heroes, the game design was terrible, the “game” part of it is extremely dated and boring, and I was extremely sickened by its idea of “humor”. I was already not expecting anything good from Shadows of the Damned, off the bat it did not look like a game I would enjoy, so did it prove me wrong like Bayonetta did or was it as bad as No More Heroes?

You take on the role of Garcia Hotspur, a demon hunter who wields a shape shifting demon called Johnson that he uses as a weapon. Hotspur is so hated in the underworld that the head demon, Fleming decides to kidnap Garcia’s girlfriend Paula. Garcia goes after them into the underworld in order to save Paula from her demise.

A main emphasis in the game is the us of “dark humor” in the game, and by dark humor this game is a series of penis jokes in dark areas more than joking around about death and macabre themes. In terms of toilet humor, this is probably the most subtle of all of the Grasshopper games, but even as “subtle” as it is, that’s not saying much at all. The humor itself I found not funny at all, I would have cracked a smile at if I was 12, but from all what I’ve played I’ve been rolling my eyes at how unfunny all the jokes are. Every line in this game works perfectly fine with “that’s what she says” jokes, but like that joke it gets too old too fast.

The game is pretty much your standard third person shooter, think Resident Evil 5 except that you can walk while aiming (yeah, it took them this long to figure this one out). Level design however does feel very out dated, levels feel like a series of rooms that you can only progress if you kill all the enemies in that area or find the needed key in that area to progress further. There is a “light world/dark world” mechanic in the game for puzzles and some enemies in the game.

The mechanic involves a dark shade that engulfs parts of the games areas, you won’t be able to survive in the shadowy areas for long time since “it eats your flesh”. Enemies within this shadowy area are invincible and need to be lured out of the shade in order to be killed. This is a very dated game mechanic that I vividly remember was one of the reasons why I didn’t enjoy Red Faction Armageddon that much, and that game did a better job in that kind of gameplay that Shadows of the Damned did. It’s a prominent part of the game and does get boring and very repetitive after a few runs.

Boss fights are majorly uninteresting, they follow a certain old boss formula where the boss is invincible until you find their weakspot. While it is an effective formula (Zelda tends to do it effectively). Shadows of the Damned however feel uninspired and dated boss fights are usuall melee boss or shoot barrel near boss to stun boss to have an opening in order to attack the bosses weak spot. I think boss fights have definitely evolved from these mechanics and Shadows of the Damned doesn’t seem to have embraced the new ideas to make the boss fights at least interesting.

Besides all the flaws in the game, if there’s anything I can say that is positive about this game is the environments and the fiction behind the game are somewhat interesting. The developers have made a good job having a good looking art style for the game, the underworld somehow gave me more a Dias de los Muertos vibe to it, I am not sure if it was intentional though. They had built a very interesting world on how this under world and demons exist, it is pretty fleshed out with a lot of interesting details.

Though even with these two merits I wasn’t able to keep on playing this game more than what I played, the dated and underwhelming gameplay did not keep me for long.

What We Think: I’d much rather recommend Red Faction: Armageddon more than this game, while it was fairly mediocre, it felt tighter than Shadows of the Damned in terms of game play and has much more fun mechanics. However, if Red Faction: Armageddon felt a little more on the serious side, there’s always Bulletstorm.

While Bulletstorm had the same style of crude sense of humor, it was making more fun at itself and took itself less seriously than Shadows of the Damned which makes it much funnier. I didn’t enjoy Shadows of the Damned, but then I wasn’t expecting to either.

Mohammad AlHuraiz

Founder, editor and host of Lochal Archade. Mohammad has been running Lochal Archade for years and working hard in bringing video game-related content to the UAE and the Middle East as a whole.

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