Shadow Warrior 2 Revs Chainsword In Gameplay Trailer
Nasty but nice
Given that Shadow Warrior 2 [official site] has a squillion weapons, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised to learn that the supernatural FPS has a Warhammer 40K-style chainsword. It looks pretty great! There's a terrible moment each time Lo Wang strikes an enemy, a drawn-out dragging as the chainsword's teeth bite into flesh. I wonder how much time went into perfecting that. Anyway! I'll surely rev one up myself after Shadow Warrior 2 launches on October 13, but for now we can watch Lo Wang swinging his in this 12-minute gameplay video:
The chainsword spraying neon blood in that blue cyberworld is pretty awful/great too.
More than anything I've seen of Shadow Warrior 2 before, though, this video does make me wonder about its procedurally-generated levels. They're built of some lovely pieces - those glowtrees! - but I do worry about how good they are. The cyberzone, especially, seems to place objectives in just... places. While some individual encounters have nice spaces, as a world it seems a bit unfocused. I'm only going off what I've seen, mind.
Given that Shadow Warrior 2 is basically, as Adam said his preview in June, "first-person Diablo" maybe I'm reading it as a different sort of game. A game made for replayability and endless co-op shenanigans won't want the same sort of levels as a linear FPS campaign.
Shadow Warrior 2 will cost £34.99/$39.99 when it arrives October 13th on Steam and GOG. It's made by Flying Wild Hog and published by Devolver Digital. I'm 97% certain the chainsword reserved for a pre-order bonus is different to the flash one in this video.
(This video was given to Ian Games Network as an exclusive in August but this version here runs at 60fps rather than 30 and doesn't have Ian's name scrawled in the corner of the screen, so don't you grumble at me that this is old news. If you want to see this cyberstuff played with the HUD on by, er, someone who's not really played Shadow Warrior 2 much, cheery RPS fanzine PC Gamer had a go.)