Shadow Complex review

Shadow Complex is really stupid fun. The game begins with a man named Jason and his girlfriend going on an afternoon hike in the verdant Uncanny Valley, when they basically trip over a huge terrorist complex where which Jason proceeds to MURDER EVERYTHING in sight. Jason spouts dreadful lines like “Huh, the killing is getting easier, I wonder if that’s a good thing. Yeahh… That’s a good thing” as my suspension of disbelief is busy jumping over a sharknado at the rest of the story’s happenings. I found the game’s narrative hilariously “So bad it’s good”, but it’s only right on the edge of the kind of stupidity that could make it a “Great” so-bad-it’s-good thing.

I say that possibly because the gameplay is a mixed bag. On the one hand the level design, up until the final chapter of the game, is actually pretty well laid out. It’s fun to explore around and collect things, and for better or worse your next objective path is laid out for you, meaning that unless you’re being OCD about power-ups you skipped, the backtracking is relatively minimal. It does kind of lose that value in the late game however when you’ve revealed a majority of the map and you’re told to go collect the last most-important items you missed. You’re locked out of acquiring the items except by specific entry points for no other reason than “The door is apparently stuck”. which felt unnecessarily restrictive. Jason moves fast, and while he’s a little wonky, I thought it was fun to navigate the passageways with him overall.

However, the combat just isn’t good – which makes it a great thing that it comes in pretty short bursts. They tried to do this 2.5D thing where enemies come at you from the background layer, but since you control your character on a 2D plain you basically have to spray and pray to target enemies in that layer. There may be some nuance to it I just didn’t get in this playthrough, but I can’t imagine having a lot of fun on the harder difficulties messing around with aiming. What they could have done is had the right analog control a cross hair for more accurate shooting, but I doubt that would have improved it all that much. Bosses were just boring; almost every single one could be defeated by finding a safe distance and then casually tapping the grenade button over and over again until it’s dead.

In spite of these problems though, I enjoyed my time with Shadow Complex. I wouldn’t call it a “Great” by any means, but for a game I probably got for free it wasn’t the worst way to spend 5 hours of time. I ended up getting 62%ish of the game’s collectables and completed 80% of the power armor.