Let me start out by saying that Shadow Complex, as I'm sure you and everyone else with an X-Box 360/internet connection/brain/orsomethinglikethat have heard, is a great game. There's no denying that. When I watched the preview footage it looked like a great game. When I beat the game, I still thought it was great. But when you're so close to the top, the upper echelon of gaming, that makes the faults stick out more. Forgive me if this review does not focus on the many amazing things that Shadow Complex does right, but rather the tiny annoyances that it gave me along the way. I'm assuming you've already read all the great stuff from...well...just about every source that is praising it (which is all of them).
That being said, Shadow Complex is good stuff. It was my introduction to a game like this....I never played the earlier Metroid/SuperMetroid/whathaveyou, so this was really my first delve into the massive map exploration/upgradeable gear challenge, mixed with some compelling action and strategy.
Ok, on to the nitty gritty, and if you don't read any further just know that Shadow Complex is a great game and is certainly deserving of whatever paltry sum it is going for on Marketplace, probably 15 bucks or so.
The introductory sequence of the game, in which you see some guy in power armor beat up on some baddies and shoot down the chopper, I thought, was a bit hokey and not really interesting. I found myself hoping the rest of the game had nothing to do with that sequence, and by and large, it did not. I mean, it was related, but I didn't have to stab myself in the eye sockets. The hokey-ness came from either poorly written dialogue, or poorly voiced dialogue. When the dialogue was decent, normally it was poorly voiced, and vice versa. This was problem that I found continued throughout the game...
I was disappointed with the overall plot and dialogue (as I mentioned earlier), but I am not faulting Orson Scott Card, who might have written some very compelling material on which this is based. Switching mediums and adapting styles and all is not a simple task. When the final credits rolled, I couldn't help but EYEBALL Peter David.
Peter David is not a bad writer. He's writing one of my favorite ongoing comics at the moment (X-Factor), and has plenty of great things under his belt, but this is not one of them. Most of the dialogue is pretty contrived and unnatural, and sometimes I wondered if I was listening in on an inside joke of some sort. Do real people talk like this? Am I the weird one?
The voice acting, like I said earlier, is by and large bad. I'm sure they didn't have a spectacular budget for something like this in a marketplace game, so it's not something I would trash the game for (LOOK AT MY RATING!), but as a person who likes things that don't suck ass, it bothered me somewhat.
The controls were fluid, but moving them rapidly made your character look like a spasmodic automaton of some sort, experiencing a system malfunction.
The Verdict: Shadow Complex is a great game for both those new to the genre and those who look back fondly on the Metroid games of old. Peter David drops the ball on dialogue, but then again, I'm allowed to be harsh on him....
