I've bought a lot of games from under-the-radar developers and am rarely
disappointed, so I took a risk on Shadow Harvest. In general if a game
is a shooter, RPG or stealth game I will like it. I was especially
interested in the stealth portion of Shadow Harvest since that genre is
criminally underrepresented today, the last real stealth game I know of
being Velvet Assassin, which was average at best. So I bought Shadow
Harvest and installed it (it uses Steamworks), ready to give it a fair
shake.
What you will notice right away is that Shadow Harvest is ugly and
also runs like crap. I have a GTX 480 and an Intel quad core processor
(the Q9550). My rig runs Crysis at 50fps on highest settings, it runs
Crysis 2 at a locked 60fps. Shadow Harvest on max settings runs at
about 15fps, maybe 20, with dips into the single digits. This is not an
anomaly with my machine, the Steam forums and other places report the
same performance. Putting the settings down to medium and even low does
little to help; I even tried 720p on all lowest settings and ended up
with 25-30fps. To put it bluntly Shadow Harvest is the most demanding
PC game I have ever played, and it looks like a 6 year old console game.
For one thing the bloom is out of control, for another there is no
real AA and tons of pop-in. Past that the models, textures and general
design is bland and simplistic. It's absolutely laughable the game
looks like it does and performs like it does.
Moving past graphics we have the gameplay itself. In Shadow Harvest
you play a typical army macho man for third-person cover-based shooting
sections and a Catwoman-style stealth chick for sneaky missions (either
or, at your discretion). The shooting segments are very rough and
unpolished, not only because the abysmal framerate makes aiming hard but
also because the cover-system is all about walking up to walls and
having it put you into cover automatically. As any first year
programming student could probably tell you, this leads to the
aggravating effect of you accidentally sticking to every wall or piece
of environment you walk near. The shooting is also hampered by the fact
that when in cover you need to hold a direction key to peek out, then
also hold RMB to aim, making cover a three-step process instead of two,
which is just bad design. The action is simple (shoot dudes! flank
dudes! shoot barrels!) and there are glitches abound like floating
weapons and checkpoints which don't update.
On the stealth side the game is a little better but still not good
at all. Stealth is mostly helped by not having to aim as much and the
slower pace, but the game still has the same problems. Dark areas are
too dark, making moving around sometimes a hassle. The levels are
mostly designed to work for stealth or shooting, making it lack a real
polished design for one kind of gameplay. The crossbow is not
satisfying to use and you have no other ranged weapons.
On top of graphics and gameplay issues the game is just very poorly
presented. The cutscenes are boring, nothing happens in them. Voice
acting is some of the worst I have ever heard in a game, much worse than
German or Russian games I have played that got quick conversions to
English like STALKER or Risen. There is a guy that is supposed to be
African in the very first level who literally sounds like a drunken frat
boy making fun of Africans more than an authentic African. The game
also suffers from a lot of console influences, despite being a PC
exclusive. Checkpoint saves, cumbersome menus, the massive bloom I
mentioned earlier, limited weapon capacity and more. It just screams
amateur hour all through the game.
I like "bad" games a lot of the time. I liked Darkest of Days,
Blacksite: Area 51, Sniper: Ghost Warrior, Jericho, Mercenaries 2,
Damnation and more... below average games that I still enjoyed because
they were shooters and they worked. Shadow Harvest is terrible even
compared to these games. The only game I see on my shelf that I could
say is as bad as Shadow Harvest is maybe Turning Point: Fall of Liberty,
but even that game I would say is better than this one solely because
it works and performs fine. Shadow Harvest is bad compared to Velvet
Assassin... compared to Splinter Cell or Thief it is downright
atrocious. I don't write bad reviews on amazon for fun, you can look at
my review history and see I am pretty lenient and accepting of flaws.
Shadow Harvest is a terrible game and I very much regret the $30 I spent
on it. DON'T MAKE MY MISTAKE!
