SPOILERS ARE NOW OPEN!

Welcome to the Unsanctioned Unofficial Game Pass Game Club Year 3! Our 6th game of 2024 is Shadow Warrior 3. The target completion date is March 25, 2024.

We ask that until that date you use the forum software to mark any spoilers, either story based or mechanical, in the discussion below. Ideally the bulk of the discussion will occur after March 25, but if you want to comment before then you are welcome to so long as the spoilers are marked. We ask that if you leave a comment before that date you also come back to the thread after it to read other people’s comments and respond to them, though of course we cannot force you to do so.

All are welcome to participate regardless of whether you have stated a preference to or not and there is absolutely no commitment. You do not have to finish the game to participate but please let us know if you have not.

You are also free to come back any time after the completion date and share your thoughts! This club is meant to be open to all whenever you want to join in the fun!

You can find out more about the Unsanctioned Unofficial Game Pass Game Club or suggest future games for it here.

What is Shadow Warrior 3?

The third in the modern Shadow Warrior trilogy of first person shooters and slashers, where you play Lo Wang, the Shadow Warrior, in his quest to defeat the ultimate evil with a lot of quips along the way. Comedic and bloody, it carries on the spirit of the 90s!

How long is Shadow Warrior 3?

How long to beat lists it as 5.5 hours long.

Interesting pick. I liked Shadow Warrior 2 quite a bit but never heard anything about 3.

One of the top 10 Love and Hate At the Same Time titles for me. Really like the gameplay, but it's ridiculously short compared to 1 and 2 which lasted around 15 hours each (though with a lot of padding, to be fair) and were also cheaper on release. And the combat, as fun as it is, feels too much like We Have Doom Eternal At Home and strips a lot of the original ideas from previous games such as dumbing down the magic system. The storyline is absolute garbage - SW2013 had a fun yet surprisingly touching story with a very decisive ending, and while the sequel's writing was so-so it at least felt like a continuation. This was more of a soft reboot tonally and it retroactively ruins the previous games by bringing a major dead character back early on in favor of more Wacky Comedy Hijinks and ignoring characters from the previous titles by just saying they got killed off-screen in a throwaway line of dialogue.

It's just kinda eh and while fun it feels as if it got butchered during development (it was announced in early 2020 during peak covid, delayed multiple times, and finally came out in early 2022) or it was grunt work and the developer, Flying Wild Hog, just wanted to get it out of the door - they had like 3 other games in development at the same time as this one. It probably sold like absolute trash too considering how little attention it got, so that's probably it for the franchise until it gets rebooted again whenever that happens.

Spoilers are now open! Spoil away! Discuss!

I regret pre-ordering Shadow Warrior 3.

The 2013 reboot was a surprising improvement over the 90s original. The sword fighting mechanics were interesting and I thought the story was actually compelling. SW2 switched to a Borderlands-style loot system with fun weapon customization, but a considerably weaker plot. I enjoyed my time with both, so I was looking forward to SW3. That was a mistake.

It goes for Doom 2016 combat, which I found to be serviceable, though significantly less polished. Weapon selection and sword techniques are greatly scaled back. But the biggest black-eye for me is the writing. The story is terrible and the dialogue is abysmal. It's quite unfortunate that the new voice actors were saddled with horrible lines. Very disappointing.