Shadows of the damned...yeah...

[riderpool]

Shadows of the damned review

...Well, I'm back.

The summer season is over and now the fall gaming season is here and my gaming review circle is so tight I cannot believe it.

So let's get to Shadows of the Damned. A game where you and your friend, a talking flaming skull have to save your hot girlfriend from the lord of the dead. Let me just say this is a SUDA-51 game...so yeah this review will be very,very,very...odd.

Let me start with the fact that I have a brand new TV, so this game is fucking awesome, the dark underworld looks amazing and there's many different types of area's. The most memorable ones have to be the following.

1. The Evil Deadish level with a ghoulish version of your girlfriend chasing you and killing you with the kiss of death...literally. No joke! Also you meet a guy who wants to kill a demon, however he is way to macho for this game and well...you'll find out.
2. The erotic level where you have to sometimes run on your girlfriends body while she's near naked...Did I mention this was a SUDA-51 game?

While the levels look good you still need good gameplay and sound design...yeah, they kick ass too.

The gameplay is from Shinji Mikami of Resident Evil/Sweet Home/Aladdin fame. The gunplay relies on only 3 guns and unlike RE4 and 5 you can move while shooting making the battles a little bit easier but they are still challenging however.

The bosses are the most...interesting bosses I have ever seen. They vary from Pimpin demon lord to 3 grim reaper sisters to even a giant freaking bird. However the basic enemy list seems to borrow from Onimusha with rolling death demons to armor demons to basic demons. In fact dress them up in samurai armor you would think this is a Onimusha reboot...from the mind of Robert Rodriguez...Actually that sounds pretty cool.

There's also a set of sections like life force or gradius that just annoyed me to the point of shutting off the game and throwing the disc back into the mail box. This came to in a boss fight thats more patience testing than fun.

Now onto the music which is from Akira Yamaoka...yeah do I really have to say this music is awesome?

The music is both emotional and it hooks you in. There are some vocal tracks that work well in the game as well. This game has a 3 point win so the question is this...what the hell happened?

I mean this thing had ads at gamestop but only 2 days afterwards I heard nothing. Nowhere, not on any gaming websites. The reason this review is so short is I cannot say anything else. This is the problem I have with games I like, its hard to talk about the reasons I really enjoy the game.

The controls are tight, the graphics nice, the music awesome, gameplay decent, and the story...weird. So do I have any complaints?

Well I got some peeves to get off my chest. The load times take a little too long in the later parts of the game and sometimes it seems the game freezes but it turns out its the load times are just taking long to kick in which scared me since I thought I would be able to play through again with my save, more on that later.

The second is the game has some odd bugs. One level actually crashed and I could only walk around with nothing loading and thinking that it was part of the level until I reset the game.

The third peeve has to do with what I said a paragraph ago. There are no replays using an existing save. Something I enjoyed in RE4 that I thought would be in this game. So this means I only have the one game scenario to play with diff difficulty levels.

These are only light hates on many great things. And you need to play this just to see what its all about.

Rating:try/buy
It should be around 40 dollars so its worth it for about 10 hours of gameplay plus varying difficulty levels and item hunting.

I wanna fly like a butterfree
David Phillips

I need the flames to get the burn!
gamefanstv@yahoo.com

also you can now yell at me on skype
search riderpool

[Oobgarm]

This is the problem I have with games I like, its hard to talk about the reasons I really enjoy the game.

Perhaps reviewing is not for you, then.

[wingzrow]

here's my review.

Too short, even by suda and mikami standards. 30 minutes is a mini game where played arcade style in a shooting range, another HOUR is spend on three levels that are side scrolling 2D shooters.

What you have left is a 4 hour game that offers you no replay ability since the gameplay doesn't really hold up. I LOVE god hand, I LOVE resident evil 4, I LOVE no more heroes, but for some reason the gameplay in this game just doesn't make me want to play again. Unlockables would have added to it a bit but you get nothing for beating the game.

Worth playing once sure, but I wouldn't buy this full price.

[dgdgagdae]

Congratulations on finishing your food shopping!

[Frankie_Says_Relax]

I just like saying "MY NAME IS GARCIA FUCKING HOTSPUR!"

and I've never even played the game.

[InsaneDavid]

Perhaps reviewing is not for you, then.

Agreed.

Also don't begin two lines directly one after the other with "Let me..." It makes it read like people are already done with your review before it's even started and you're desperate to keep their attention.

The third peeve has to do with what I said a paragraph ago. There are no replays using an existing save. Something I enjoyed in RE4 that I thought would be in this game. So this means I only have the one game scenario to play with diff difficulty levels.

Two sentences does not make a paragraph, especially when one is incomplete and the other is a run-on.

[exit]

For a second there, I thought I went back in time and ended up on someones Live Journal. I TL;DR'd this, mainly because there's already a thread for the game that pretty much says all of this in it, only more coherently.