Shadow complex is a game that very little bad things can be said about, but like Sony's pricing logic, it isn't without it's faults.
You play as Jason, an everyman who just wants some fun in a cave with a girl he only just met. Whilst there though, they happen to stumble upon a secret lair. Clair gets kidnapped, and Jason, with his chances of sex fully ruined, blindly stumbles in to save her and her boobs.
As you make your way around the titular "Shadow Complex" you will be greeted by a bunch of nice fellows in masks, and as Half-life 2 taught us, never trust a nice guy in a mask. These goon's come in a variety of flavors, with the standard soldier, the guy with a pistol, the red soldier, the ninja soldier and the big rocket launcher/minigun soldier. Now if your wondering why I don't know the specifics of the enemies, then I would respond that the game doesn't want me to know. It keeps all it's idea's and explanations close enough so you can see them, but far enough away so you can't read the little plac underneath.
Story is this game's version of a loveless marriage. It just wakes up in the morning wishing as little of it as possible before going to a bar and fucking a hooker. The story pops out of nowhere at random intervals, usually as you make your way though a particularly long vent. Although the voice acting is superb and the way the game delivers it too you is very natural and well executed, you can never help but think that you are not hearing the conversation of the soldiers the game points out to you. They all just stand around doing their idle animations as the voice over blabs away. At one point I managed to interrupt a conversation mid-sentence with a sweet-ass grenade throw, but the voice kept going for another second before another voice kicked in, shouting about stuff they hadn't even said yet. Why this man doesn't stop trying to create an army to invade new york and telekinesis everyone in the pentagon the fuck up I'll never know.
Another little quiff is the various upgrades you get though the course of your exploration. Although the upgrades themselves are unique, only two really gives you a revolutionary new way to play. This leaves the others felling like they were just crammed in there to be used as puzzle solutions, much like 12 year old goths. It also gives the feeling that instead of becoming more powerful, your just becoming more flashy, a job that could be replaced with a colourful sticker book.
The game's major strong point is the combat. The various gun upgrades you receive are balanced and get progressively more kick-ass, until the last one, where you get a ridiculous auto shotgun Gauss cannon face-destroyer thing. If you run close enough to any enemy in the game and tap B, Jason with pull some Bourne Identity shit out his ass and beat the life out of them in a needlessly excessive way. You can also unlock a gold version of these weapon's though collecting various gold bars around the complex. The secret room stays open throughout the rest of your playthroughs, which doesn't seem like a problem until you find yourself wanting to start over from scratch. You can completely ignore this room, but dangle a gold shiny overpowered shotgun in the face of the average xbox gamer and they will take to it like a fly to shit.
But, to the games credit, the game looks beautiful, the facility has brilliant and unique areas, your character controls well, the boss fights are interesting, and the game's finale is a gobsmacking sequence that I will remember as the first time I shot an Airship with three nuke's whilst blowing up two giant spiders and a helicopter.
