Shadow Warrior 2

I have severe buyers remorse for this game, I thought it would be a fun Boomer shooter, but instead I got less funny Asian Borderlands. I'd ask for my money back but I paid 3 bucks for it so its no skin off my nose overall.

Special in its own way
Among the best
A lot
Very much
Liked
Was cool
Managed to finish it....... had enough fun to give it a like though
I tried....

Humorous vibe.
Great Co-op stress reliever.
Weapon modification is simply limitless.
Same said variety demising demons.
For those new & old all at once.
No complaints.

I anticipated an up to the standards sequel to the first game (which I liked very much), and in the beginning I was impressed even more with doom-eternal style mechanics! But the game just doesn't stick. There is a lot of stuff dumped at the player, a lot of weapons, a lot of upgrades, which you need to swap after 2-3 fights. After a while the game told me that i'm too weak to continue the story suggesting me to grind side missions. And the story is buried under layers of stupid jokes, sarcasm or just boring cut scenes. I was disappointed(

so....

---{ Graphics }---
☐ You forget what reality is
☐ Beautiful
☑ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS

---{ Gameplay }---
☑ Very good
☐ Good
☐ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't

---{ Audio }---
☐ Eargasm
☐ Very good
☐ Good
☑ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf

---{ Audience }---
☐ Kids
☐ Teens
☑ Adults
☐ Grandma

---{ PC Requirements }---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☑ Potato
☐ Decent
☐ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer

---{ Game Size }---
☐ Floppy Disk
☑ Old Fashioned
☐ Workable
☐ Big
☐ Will eat 10% of your 1TB hard drive
☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it
☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data

---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☐ Easy
☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Significant brain usage
☐ Difficult
☑ Dark Souls

IF you are a gamer... and a serious sam one... you will play the hardest difficulty there is... and HAVE FUN

---{ Grind }---
☐ Nothing to grind
☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☐ Isn't necessary to progress
☐ Average grind level
☐ Too much grind
☑ You'll need a second life for grinding

a LOT of grinding... but a fun one.

---{ Story }---
☐ No Story
☐ Some lore
☐ Average
☐ Good
☐ Lovely
☑ It'll replace your life...... of P**** JOKES

---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☐ Average
☐ Long
☑ To infinity and beyond..... because you can do NG+ and put even higher difficulty more more OP S***

---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☑ Worth the price
☐ If it's on sale
☐ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money

---{ Bugs }---
☐ Never heard of
☑ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs

---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☐ 6
☐ 7
☐ 8
☐ 9
☑ 10

---{ Author }---
☑ https://vojtastruhar.github.io/steam-review-template

don't fuck with Lo Wang

🔰SHREDVIEW🔰 - From someone who actually plays and finishes the games before reviewing.

🔷 ABOUT THE GAME & LORE 🔷

When the world’s falling apart or John Wick needs a hand, you call Lo Wang. Shadow Warrior 2 drops you into a chaotic, demon-infested future where everything’s literally gone to hell and only a wisecracking, katana-swinging mercenary can clean up the mess. Sounds about right, yes? Think of it as Doom on a bender but with swords, guns, and a lot of inappropriate jokes.

It all kicks off with a simple mission gone sideways, landing Wang in the middle of a war between corporations, demons, and some ancient magic that’s way above his pay grade. But do not worry, you have the company of a snarky AI companion as you carve a way through hordes of enemies, trying to fix everything with violence and sarcasm.

Lore-wise, it’s a mix of Eastern mythology, modern corporate greed, and straight-up chaos. It’s Shakespeare on crack, Victor Hugo on absinth, it's fun, it's beautiful and completely fucking nuts. Really nobody's here for the lore tho, this is Lo Wang’s world, and we’re lucky for the ticket.

🔷 THE GAMEPLAY 🔷

👉 GENERAL:
First person action & chaos in its purest form. The game is set on fast-paced combat, throws in katanas, an armory full of ridiculous & cool weapons then cranks it all up with procedural generation and a lot of enemies & mechanics to break them. This isn’t your typical "shoot, reload, repeat" gig but a full-blown massacre with style, speed, and most important: sassiness.

▪︎ The main purpose is kept very simple, very standard format for a FPS, you get main quests, side quests, a few challenges, a few collectibles and A LOT of weapons to either shoot or slice through

▪︎ To keep it fresh, we are looking at a very diverse arsenal with a total of 79 unique weapons including blades, rocket launchers, rifles, chainsaws, shotguns, dragon head machine guns, you name it. You can unlock these as drops from special enemies, story or random loot from containers. Each weapon has 3 slots in which gems can be fitted to boost damage outcome or elemental output.

▪︎ The player skill tree is based on a card system, there are a total of 48 skill cards which can then be upgraded with skill points earned as you level up. These cards are unlocked via story or drop from special enemies, once earned, forever remains. Some cards are given by default from the game.

▪︎ Power Gems are items that can be fitted into weapons as mentioned above, these drop constantly from all sources in different rarity levels ranging from common to legendary, just like weapons, however, everything is balanced, more powerful and rare gems have also a downside to them.

▪︎ Elemental damage is a huge part of the damage output mechanics, they also relate to an achievement for each elemental type so try all of them.

▪︎ Every mission with the exception of few story ones are replayable from the game's map. Make sure you focus on whatever you have to do in the story missions in one go to avoid multiple playthroughs.

👉 NAVIGATION SYSTEM
Game has one map screen and everything is on that one screen, if you find it difficult to navigate the map then go back to school. Other than that, the inventory/upgrades menu takes a while to get used to.

👉 PHYSICS & MECHANICS
Matches the game's environment and fast-paced action properly, meaning devs became water. For the intended gameplay style, the physics don't need to be realistic and they do a great job at it. Of course, there's small things like: Some items spawn under the terrain, you see them on minimap and won’t be able to pick them up, other issue I found was with the air control mechanics, you can’t freely adjust direction, for a game this "kill bill" realistic, that would've made sense!

👉 GRAPHICS & OPTIMIZATION
The graphics are decent. Once you get used to them you'll be fine but it used to put pressure on my eyes due to the very colorful palette and how sped up everything is. You got effects, fire, explosions, projectiles & enemies everywhere. The gane looks comic-book or sci-fi but very well animated. It's not "eye candy" but it shouldn't be either.

👉 ACHIEVEMENTS & COLLECTIBLES
Unexpectedly easy to 100%, I had a good look through a guide and the achievements beforehand and it was piece of cake. I finished everything in 29 hours. 80% of achievements are quest related, every single main quest or side quest has a boss in the playable area and there's an achievement for each including the campaign ones, other than that easy to do and nothing missable if studied well before. At some point you will get powerful enough to just run through all content really easy. I followed this amazing guide: PS: The 1000 masamune orbs and the 10 million coins achievements are really ass and take a while.

🔷 CONCLUSION: 🔷

If you're looking for a quick intense action gig, this is sure not the game you want but the one you need. If you're only looking for a game thats easy on achievements, you'll also have a lot of fun doing it. I have played the original Shadow Warrior when I was a kid, this sure brought up memories and quite a laugh. Really well tailored around it's genre for a weekend quest.

🔷 PROS & CONS 🔷

✔️ PROS:
- Very entertaining fast-paced combat.
- Broad arsenal, many choices, much gore.
- Well used ridiculous factor in the character & story writing.
- Perfect length for its campaign & completion tasks.
- Well optimized, flows like water.
- Unexpected enough.
- Very do-able achievements.

❌ CONS:
- At some point you become very OP.
- Secrets are very annoying to search for.
- Not the most intuitive inventory menu.
- Could've refrained from respawning enemies and let me clear a whole damn map, I could replay it to run through its enemies again
- Fire the companion's voice actor

　🔷 SHORT REVIEW & STATS 🔷

• PLAY STYLE:
🔳 PVP
✅ PVE
🔳 ONLINE CO-OP
🔳 Online Multiplayer
🔳 SPLIT SCREEN
✅ SINGLE PLAYER

• GRAPHICS:
🔳 Fire the designer.
🔳 Fairly old game, what you expect?
✅ Not great, not terrible.
🔳 Great
🔳 Exceptional

• REPLAYABILITY:
🔳 YES
🔳 EVERY NOW AND THEN
🔳 NOT SURE
🔳 RARELY / ON MAJOR UPDATE / DLC RELEASE
✅ NO

• STEAM ACHIEVEMENTS:
✅ YES
🔳 NO (WTF MAN)

• GAMEPLAY:
🔳 WTF IS THIS SHIT
🔳 TERRIBLE
✅ DECENT
🔳 ENGAGING
🔳 HAD A BLAST

• DIFFICULTY
🔳 DARK SOULS
🔳 BAFFLING
🔳 CHALLENGING
✅ MEDIUM
🔳 WALK IN THE PARK

• STORYLINE:
🔳 A WHAT? WE WRITE CODE NOT BOOKS
✅ GOES FINE WITHOUT ONE
🔳 DECENT
🔳 ENGAGING
🔳 SHAKESPEARE AINT GOT S**T ON THIS

❗ NOTE - This is a review based on personal preferences and opinions. I always suggest you try the games for yourself before letting others decide for you. Even though we're all gamers, we are sure not the same.

It has better graphics than Shadow Warrior (2013) and has free roam (semi-open world) design. I played a couple of side missions to make more money, earn skills and weapons thinking that it might be necessary to succeed in the boss battles, later I realized that it was not necessary to play the side missions.

The game had no crash. FPS was very stable. The only glitch I noticed was when I fell from a 20 feet high rock and landed between bamboos, I couldn't get out using any movement or weapon. I had to exit the game and relaunch to proceed. The range of weapons is very broad.

On Normal difficulty (called 'I have no fear') the game is very generous in granting ammo & health during boss battles. If you die you instantly spawn back with full health & Chi but the enemies or Boss does not regenerate. Doom (2016) released in the same year gives you hell but Shadow Warrior 2 is significantly easier but still challenging.

its was like an old school shooter with new tech style. 5 stars.

Good Brainless fun! Get while on Discount. its not worth much more than that.

Shadow Warrior 2 Review – 60 Hours In

Gameplay – Fast, Fluid, and Frenzied

World – Gorgeous, But Lacking Depth

Highlights – What Makes It Shine

Cons – Minor Setbacks

Final Thoughts – A Bloody Good Time

Deelt wrote:

If you found this review helpful, please give it a like or an award! Thanks for reading, and happy slashing!

No hoji -10/10

My rating: 7.5/10
The perfect game when you're having a bad day and want to have some fun, or you just want to destroy some demons and other creatures. A very large selection of weapons and the ability to upgrade them, funny texts and various cool characters. As for the plot, it is quite interesting, but unfortunately at the end I really had no idea what happened or why it happened.

Having revisited this game after a long time I can say that it has some fun movement and satisfying gore. Some people might complain about the cheesy jokes, but, c'mon man, it's Shadow Warrior, what do you expect.

However, several things just kill the flow of the game. The first one is repetitive quest design. The second and main one is the upgrade system. You have to constantly micro-manage tons of various trinkets you pick up in order to improve various stats by a few percentage points. The sheer amount of them is overwhelming. Additionally, you have to do inventory management once your backpack fills up. This aspect feels sort of antithetical to the series' game design and is just plain annoying.

However, if you're still curious and want to try this game out, I would recommend waiting for a sale. The game is frequently 90% off and at that price you're not losing much.

You can't handle my Wang!

Shadow Warrior 2 is the biggest surprise of my year in 2024.

This game is an absolute masterpiece, and yes, I am comparing it to games that have come out in the past year. I enjoyed the first Shadow Warrior's combat and silly jokes naturally, but my lack of knowledge regarding Shadow Warrior 2 led me to absolutely falling in love the moment I picked it up.

Unlike Shadow Warrior 3, Shadow Warrior 2 uses a more life-like graphics model rather than a cartoon-like format. Shadow Warrior 2 might just be the most violent/goriest game I have ever played.

Shadow Warrior 1 was very linear in it's level progression, Shadow Warrior 2 is similar in the sense that each level has it's own area. Howver, in the second game, these maps are very large. While there is a mini-map and an objective trail in the game's map, these maps are large enough to vastly explore, and most missions (including side missions) have a hidden 2nd boss somewhere in the map that also grants a steam acheivement when you kill them.

Shadow Warrior 2 was slept on because of how violent it was and is possibly one of the games that sparked the whole anti-violence in video games wave, but hey, its 2025 son chop some shit up cuz.

+ Can be funny at times
+ Has a serious same vibe
- Coop does add to the experience but cannot save it
- Weapons are luck luster and boring
- Boring fetch quests
- Messy UI

hella chill didnt expect it

Tight controls, great weapons, and a lot of enemy variety. Skills are varied and all have their uses, and combat encounters are rarely dull once you realize just how many tools are in your arsenal. The gameplay is a lot more dynamic than Borderlands, and I enjoy the game's personality - obnoxious but sometimes funny, and never boring.

It is a hack and slash looter shooter game but with annoying enemies and dialogues. The story is meh.

Poor man's borderlands. Please don't play this. Even for cheap.
Cringiest humour and story I've played all year.
I feel bad for me for playing this.

Things I liked
•Lo Wang's sense of humor [If killing you guys is wrong then i don't want to right]
•World design is beautiful.

Things i didn't like
•Boring Side quests
•Forcing this game to be a looter shooter
•Level design is very repetitive.

I've about had my limit with it. As far as a shooter goes, it is mediocre at best. Wasn't expecting a looter shooter that did not want me to know if anything that I picked up was better than anything I already had equipped. It also has a miss stat which is real fun because it means that even though I'm aiming at an enemies head, it is random chance whether I hit that target or not. Combined with the low amounts of ammo, makes me feel like they wanted me to use the swords as a primary instead, which makes sense swords have an easy hotkey while the guns don't, but those can be pretty jank too so who knows. The game pushes the sword abilities but they're context dependent on which direction you're inputting which means using them in a fraught fight is usually a gamble. Am I going to get a spin attack or am I going to get a projectile attack? One is useful and the other gets me boxed around the ears while Im defenseless. Who knows?

Also the games writing and story is atrocious. I expected the juvenile humour going in although to it's credit I vastly underestimated it. Shame on me. The real problem is how unfunny most of it is. You're also saddled with a ride along character who is grating and uninteresting. She contributes nothing of note besides poorly written exposition that nobody cares about and just angrily shouting at the main character in a huff. It's more pouting than anger. I'm not sure who is more annoying her or the main character's constant dick jokes delivered in what often sounds more like an impression of the City Wok guy from South Park than anything else.

At it's best SW2 is mediocre and at it's worst it is insufferable. I didn't think that I would enjoy the quips but I was hoping for a good shooter with a story that would stay out of my way. What I got was a below average shooter that really wanted me to pay attention to it's story.

Another sequel that belongs in the garbage
This game sucks

Gameplay is fabulous and Wang funny af

like shadow warrior one but better and also worse at the same time, don't ask me how that works

Fast moving action with good controls. Good weapons, perks, and progression system. Visually beautiful. Great coop.

good game

Its good except for the map. You don't know what direction or next checkpoint you have to reach. I found myself backtracking on where to go or how to reach the next area

A plot twist in a plot twist inside a plot twist

funny sword ninja simulator. 34/10

Awesome FPS with elements of rpg (just a little bit) it rocks

Played in coop the whole campaign.
Fun game, not perfect, but very entertaining!
The netcode is pretty terrible though, it does not handle well weak connections, so we experienced lots of disconnections during the play-through.
To play in single player or in coop with a good connection is absolutely recommended.

doom guy if he was asian and obsessed with dick jokes and cyber bullying.

Best Borderlands i've ever played. This is a fact and my disappointment is disappointed.

You're some uber-chad weeb who talks a lot of shit and kills mountains upon mountains of baddies

Then you start playing this game

This game is like having a real good piece of cake. It looks pretty, goes down well and does what it does, be a good piece of cake. I don't know about ya'll but no matter how pretty the cake is, too much is too much. The combat is fun, cool, and action-filled but it kinda gets old after a bit. The story is awful besides wang's anecdotes (ghost girl was just kind of annoying). The environments and monsters looked cool but not that special. I mean yeah, solid piece of cake uh I'm probably not going to finish the rest and I'll forget about it and let others enjoy it most likely. I'd give this a 6/10 and say it's worth around 5 bucks by yourself but with friends I'd bump it up to 8 dollars. (the bow is OP)

Its bloody , its messy and its a hell of a lot better of a boomer shooter than that new Doom game would ever be !

Im a worse person now, And all of the voice Acting was inhumanly grating.

Fun and addicting gameplay

It's a good looter-shooter with a decent plot. If you're expecting linear levels in this game like the first and third one, think again. Every mission essentially boils down to: talk to NPC, accept quest, go to location, kill some enemies and grab quest items, come back to dragon mountain and turn in quest. Most side quests and main quests doesn't follow that formula to a T, but it feels close. The looter-shooter aspects feel great though. Lots of different weapons and tons of different builds you can make. Graphics are a little dated, but that's ok. Overall, I think Shadow Warrior 1 is better, but this game is worth playing.

The animations and constant visual effects make this game unplayable - good luck trying to see what you're shooting at when the camera is moving on it's own. I don't suffer from motion sickness but it's seriously vomit-inducing.

Fun game for a bit. Kind of a less serious Doom 2016.

I didn't finish it. Setting up coop isn't convenient enough, you have to know beforehand how many people will join to set the base difficulty. It just seems like the multiplayer here was slapped on as an afterthought. Enemy/difficulty scaling doesn't feel right.

Get it on extreme sale, at least 90% off.

Mhm, SWORD - For when you wanna make it PERSONAL

This game is so fast, chaotic, and ridiculously fun while it lasts. The gameplay? Chef’s kiss. It’s got that over-the-top DOOM-style action mixed with RPG and looter-shooter vibes à la Borderlands. You can customize your weapons to become so broken that it feels like you’re cheating, and honestly, that’s half the fun.

But then there’s the story, and, uh... what story? It’s not even linear—there’s a hub where you pick missions, including side quests and bounties, to grind money, skill points, and weapons. You don’t have to do them, though; you can skip straight to the main campaign. But here’s the catch—the campaign is laughably short. I’m talking 1-2 hours short. The game even hints that you should do side missions to level up, but you really don’t need to. The difficulty’s a breeze even if you skip all the grinding.

This is where the game feels like it’s having an identity crisis. It’s got this big looter-shooter setup, but the main story’s so short it’s like, "Why did you even bother?" And that story? Yeah, it’s a hot mess. Disjointed, weird, and not remotely interesting.

But let’s be real: none of that matters because the gameplay is an absolute blast. The combat is so good it pretty much carries the whole game. You’re zipping around, slicing, shooting, and blowing stuff up, and it’s all so smooth and satisfying. Once you find your favorite weapons and crank them up to god-tier, you’ll feel unstoppable.

That said, once the story’s done and you’ve hit your peak power fantasy, there’s not much reason to keep playing.

If you love DOOM’s speed, Borderlands’ loot system, and don’t care too much about a solid narrative, you’ll probably have a great time with this. Just don’t expect it to stick around in your rotation for long.

TLDR: Decent fun, but forgettable. Awesome shooting mechanics, less so with the looting. The lack of a cohesive endgame truly shows this isn’t a looter shooter meant to be taken seriously.

PROS:

CONS:

Content (Game world/Narrative/Length) – [5/10]

Gameplay (Mechanics/Difficulty) – [6/10]

Graphics (Quality/Performance) – [6/10]

Audio (Sound Effects/Music) – [5/10]

Replay Factor (Longevity) – [5/10]

Final Verdict – [6/10]

Recommend? [Y/N]

Yes

Easily one of the best shooters of all time, no time wasting, solid story and fun game play. Worth every penny.

I definitely preferred the 1st game for a solo experience, but if you wanted to play shadow warrior with your friend(s), this may scratch that itch.

It changes the play significantly from the first game, as this is a looter-shooter style game more in the vein of Borderlands. The game itself is very mid, but isn't bad.

Very good game. Buildcrafting, farming, online coop, infinite replays, enough weapons (circa 70), ego one liners and fluid combat makes this a perfect mess. Hogs really went all out with this entry and it's still their peak today.
Roadhog engine is pushed to it's limit, with it's unrivaled dynamic destructible environments. With addition of semi open world with procedural weather and maps can lead to interesting combinations. This can also bring some visual bugs, like trees clipping into objects, holes in world and such. Hogs should either tweak that or remove world procedurality alltogether and keep only the weather aspect.

Unfortunately Hogs abandoned their engine in favor of janky Unreal, and with their recent titles you can easily tell, that the magic their games once possessed was snuffed out in favor of generosity, so I don't think we ever see games like Shadow Warrior 1/2 again. Unfortunate.

What I really don't like are menus, they are just wrong. Mainly managing relics is a nightmare. Upgrade system is very cluttered and unintuitive, everything is all over the place and hard to manage.
Another is a balance, for example the difficulty spike between insanity 3 to 4 is immense.

Story is very forgettable and confusing with non existing world building, also it's very short. Hogs were never good at story telling, what they were good is design and gameplay and it's also the best aspect of the game.