Shadow Complex

To call Shadow Complex just another stake in the “Metroidvania” style would be selling it short. Indeed, you traverse across a 2D plane and scrounge through corridors for items of marginal importance, but pinpointing the game’s parallels to Super Metroid and Castlevania cannot do it justice. Rather, Shadow Complex is a game that may very well serve as a benchmark for future Xbox Live Arcade titles. Developer Chair manages to make that traversal across a 2D plane more satisfying with the addition of a 3D backdrop, and turns those items of marginal importance into keystones of your success. While a few dents manifest themselves along the way, Shadow Complex remains fun and addictive from beginning to end. And when you reach the end, there’s enough to persuade you to return for another sabbatical. And then a few more.

You’re not going to return for the story, however. As Jason Flemming, your innocent hiking trip with your girlfriend, Claire, quickly turns sour when you stumble upon the headquarters of a home grown terrorist group, The Restoration. Claire is swiftly abducted by some sinister suited men, so it’s up to Jason, now an everyman-turned-superspy, to rescue her. Basically, you’re thrust into the facility – presumably the “shadow complex,” although it’s never explicitly mentioned what the title entails – on a goose chase to save Claire, but you probably wouldn’t know this (or care) if it weren’t for the cut-scenes scattered messily throughout the game. And it’s relieving that these cut scenes are as brief as they are, because the dialog is cringe-inducing and clichéd to the point of reposing an already mediocre story. This is both unfortunate and ironic considering the plot’s basis on the novel Empire by Orson Scott Card; an authour known for his deeply human characters (among other controversies). Even disregarding that fact, Shadow Complex scrapes the bottom of the barrel as far as action hero yarn goes.

But it would be a shame to chastise Shadow Complex as a whole for its poorly done story, because the game isn’t really about saving Claire and cracking down on The Restoration’s malicious terrorist schemes; it’s about exploring the complex with your cool toys and advancing your character by levelling up and finding collectibles. You begin with two fundamentals: a flashlight that illuminates destructible entrances and climbing gear that helps you temporarily latch onto vertical surfaces. It’s not long before you receive your first pistol, and after that your arsenal will increase in both size and sophistication. You’ll get plenty of useful attachments that benefit both exploration and combat, a unique one being the foam gun. The foam it launches congeals on impact and can perform a manner of tasks, such as bridging you to the other side of an electrical pool or plastering enemies so you can stick grenades onto them. There are also armour upgrades, such as a jetback that gives you a short vertical boost and boot enhancements called friction dampeners that, when charged, send you on a zooming sprint.

In addition to these practical upgrades, there’s a prolific amount of collectibles hidden throughout the facility, some of which are initially useless (gold bars and passkeys) while others serve an obvious, albeit passive purpose (health upgrades and grenade packs). Exploring and backtracking to collect items may sound pedestrian, but you’ll get hooked on finding every last one, even if they don’t directly benefit your character. In the process you’ll watch an elaborate blueprint of your discoveries unfold before you on your menu map. The map is multi-purposed, giving you direction on where to go next but also revealing opportunities to explore the facility and find new items. As such, there’s an immense sense of progression to be found in these endeavors, and it’s all the more admirable that the act of exploring to obtain items can be so enjoyable in Shadow Complex. It’s both an obsessive compulsive’s dream and a scatterbrain’s guilty pleasure.

However, your endless pursuit of items won’t intrude on the combat, which is actually complimented by it and is entertaining on its own. It’s worth noting that there are pages ripped out of Super Metroid here, but this doesn’t undermine the sidescrolling fun to be had. In fact, Shadow Complex bears one distinguishing feature of its own, and that’s the third dimension. Although you run along a 2D plane and generally encounter enemies in that fashion, you have the ability target and shoot enemies who choose to come at you from 3D. But once you flick the analog stick towards an enemy in the background, it’s pretty much up to the game to decide where to target, making 3D shooting a bit clumsy. Nevertheless, killing soldiers is satisfying, and even more so when you use the environment to your advantage. Other than taking cover behind crates and what-not, you can shoot down an electrical cable so it flails around and kills soldiers like a deadly tendril, punt a spider-bot towards a soldier and watch it explode in his face, and launch a grenade into a chute that generates streams of fire nearby. Some exciting boss battles show the game’s action-packing potential. They pit you against a bunch of enormous mech-like contraptions that aren’t very intelligent but provide a refreshing adrenaline rush. The final boss battle is arguably the best, and perhaps the most astounding sequence in the entire game. Here, foreground and background combat are wonderfully woven together, making you wish that there were more encounters like it.

The result of Shadow Complex’s mixture of addictive item harvesting and interesting combat is gameplay that retains its gloss after many playthroughs. But a challenge mode, called proving grounds, is thrown in for good measure anyway. This mode takes memorable sequences from the campaign and enlarges them through a series of stages. It’s a nice addition if you’re feeling particularly competitive, since you can compare your scores to those of your friends. Not to mention you can also compare your campaign achievements to your friends' through periodic in-game pop-ups.

It’s too bad that the visuals don’t always match Shadow Complex’s high standard of, well, everything. Save for some stunning lighting effects and nifty level designs, the textures and framerate carry an air of inconsistency about them. You’ll glory in the soft red lights gleaming on your bionic suit in one room, but then you’ll wince at the dull textures in another room that look like they’ve been plucked from a game a decade prior. However, it’s the wacky framerate that really skews the game’s visuals. For me, it dipped to unbelievably low numbers when a lot of enemies were onscreen (and concerning the game at hand, ‘a lot’ is usually eight or nine) and botched quite a few spectacular battles. Music is rarely ever cued, but it’s strangely effective when it is. A soft piano piece drops into the background every now and then, and when you clear a room of soldiers a short TV-action-hero chime plays to your delight.

Just like all the upgrades that accumulate to boost your character, everything in Shadow Complex pools together to enhance the experience. Well, almost everything; it’s not utterly flawless. Still, it’s a truly remarkable game that grapples influence from the sidescrollers of yore yet remains wholly unique. For 1200 MS points, you’ll cherish Shadow Complex even if you intend to spend only a couple of hours with it. Just don’t be surprised when that couple of hours turns into ten or more.