"Fear is subordinated to the heart of courage." The guy across the street said to me. He wanted to play the role of a teacher meaningfully.
Wang Luo, the protagonist of Shadow Samurai 2, replied, "Hey, I thought I was subordinate to the brave jb." ”
I'm already laughing when I see this, but the conversation that follows is even more amusing. Although these jokes require the player to be "in the play" enough, the understanding of these jokes largely determines your understanding of the story of Lao Wang. The game offers a great fighting and co-op experience, but the process is filled with a lot of giant dicks: giant dick-shaped swords on the stand, giant dick-shaped constellations embedded in the sky, and words like giant dick hanging on the lips. Very vulgar, very shallow, and kind of reminds me of the wonderful content in Duke Doom. But the Duke never made me laugh like that.
You can't believe it, Shadow Samurai 2 has a good backstory, a young woman's soul is trapped in the body of the old king, so they must constantly kill various interdimensional demons to regain the girl's body and let her soul return to her body. Of course, this slightly cheesy plot is not worth mentioning compared with the witty words and lower limit spit in the game. Lao Wang's attitude towards everything is simple and rude, but behind it seems to hide the wisdom of the fool, even when I play the cooperation mode with my friends, I am not willing to talk more, but want to hear the protagonist's own next spit.
In fact, in 2013, the first project restart of "Shadow Samurai" had signs of this, but "Shadow Samurai 2" completely carried it forward. Shadow Samurai features a linear level design, while Shadow Samurai 2's 12-hour single-player/multiplayer co-op story flow is filled with open spaces and fast teleportation points scattered around, each with a corresponding teleportation point.
It was this diversity of environmental scenes and consistent appeal that surprised me. In an hour or two, the game may transition from a steampunk neon city to another quiet mountain forest, and the switching between scenes makes sense from a plot point of view. In addition, the scene design also incorporates a lot of vertical three-dimensional spatial structure, which allows the protagonist to jump on the roof and fly over the terrain. Some side quest areas even use randomly generated map technology to increase playability, but sometimes there are bugs, and I've encountered a wasteland with not a single enemy.
The core of shadow samurai 2's action elements is 2016's Doom 4, but it is decorated with heavy meat strips and oriental themes, which is commendable for successfully doing so. The game feels flexible and fast, the protagonist flashes and moves, with the second jump can ignore any fall damage, but also flexibly dodge the enemy's attacks. There are many kinds of weapons in the game, both physical weapons and soul weapons, the protagonist can use qigong to shock the enemy back, or use the ability to temporarily stealth through the demon army, each kind of gameplay can be switched at any time, the clouds flow, almost can produce beauty.
However, the most eye-catching element of this game is the melee attack, the game can accurately produce stumps and pieces of flesh in the direction of the player's cutting, so it is refreshing to slash and kill. The game encourages players to challenge their strongest enemies, use enhanced skills, slash iron like a storm of blades, or skewer enemies into meat skewers from a distance.
The game's skill point allocation system will give players both progression and ranged routes, but the fun of Shadow Samurai 2 is that choosing one does not mean that you have to give up the other. The previous game emphasized melee combat, so long-range weapons generally performed poorly. The ranged guns in Shadow Samurai 2 are completely capable of being on their own. The shotgun is just as violent as in Doom 4, and the skull-shaped machine gun feels like a sieve of demons. There are more than 70 kinds of weapons in the game, which is enough for players to play for a while. And even upgrading a normal bow to a slightly less ordinary bow was enough to shut me down the model and details of the new weapon.
Many battles are juggling, and players must switch weapons frequently and quickly. There is a battle on a glass skyscraper that requires the player to fight against a robot, which looks like the ed-209 in "Machine Cop", at first the player needs to dodge the arc of fire and slash at the legs, but when the health drops below half, he will open the shield and release the floating spherical drone, at this time the melee blade is inefficient, need to be replaced by a shotgun, two shots can collapse a drone, and finally use bazooka to quickly solve the boss.
The big guys with names in the game can be regarded as small bosses, and their appearance always brings a fresh challenge to the game. The author hopes that the diversity of combat and environmental design can also be transferred to the monster, because the design of the boss is a bit repetitive, there will always be a shield, the player will need to fight creeps, at most just a change of appearance, giant robots, giant samurai, giant snake people. After playing for a few hours, I had a headache as soon as I saw the shield.
Fortunately, other real bosses are very interesting, such as the first big boss is like a hill, trampling with his feet to stomp the player to death. Occasionally, many lasers are fired, and they have to dodge while dealing with the summoned trash fish. It's not too memorable for the boss battles, but at least it's not too boring.
Enemies will drop treasures after death, and treasures are the driving force behind Shadow Samurai 2, obviously borrowing a lot from the essence of Borderlands and Dark Oh Bad God. The value of the treasure is reflected in different weapon effects, which can increase the critical strike chance or fire damage and other settings. After a few hours of play, players can craft new weapons from existing weapons. This design is critical because rare weapons are loved by everyone, but ordinary weapons are still valuable.
Shadow Samurai 2's co-op mode is also fun, with up to 4 people working together, and the players will be more up when they have a special team positioning. (Everyone looks at themselves as lao wang, and everyone else as a melon-eating ninja.) Replaying previous levels in co-op mode brings new fun, especially since enemy types appear randomly and may be a different experience each time.
If there's one drawback to co-op mode, it's that enemy strength isn't increased, it's just a simple increase in health in order to survive the combined firepower of four players. But even so, I still enjoyed seeing the enemy interact with me, especially the way I was dismembered, the way I was cut by the sword qi, and the way I was scratched by the iron claws. If only the types of demons could be diversified a little more.
epilogue
Lao Wang's wise and foolish nonsense made me laugh from beginning to end, rich melee and ranged weapons, colorful treasure drops are very satisfactory, enough to make people invite two or three friends to fight again. It's fun to do it alone or to work together, and while the degree of randomization is small, it's enough to make the first few clearances fresh.
Shadow Samurai 2 ign rating: 8.6 points
Shadow Samurai 2 is an energetic gun brushing game that can shoot from a distance or in close combat, supports a co-op mode, and contains a large number of meat strips.