Shadows of the Damned

The bland cover art and cliched title does nothing to hint at the madness within. Shadows of the Damned is a startlingly original game, a collaboration between Suda 51 (No More Heroes), Shinji Mikami (Resident Evil 4) and Akira Yamaoka (Sound Director of Silent Hill). The plot is essentially a modern retelling of Dante's Inferno, heavily influenced by the grindhouse style. The games protagonist, Garcia Hotspur, would fit perfectly into a Robert Rodriguez movie. His demon slaying has infuriated Fleming - Lord of the Underworld, who rises up and kidnaps his girlfriend Paula. Accompanied by a filthy mouthed, upgradeable human skull by the name of Johnson, Garcia must rescue his lover from the City of the Damned.

There's a great deal of sexual innuendo, which is well delivered, and actually very funny. For example, one of Johnson's weapons is called the Boner, which can be upgraded to the Big Boner, and finally the Hot Boner. It leads to Garcia shouting lines like "Taste my big boner" as he dispatches demons. Dialogue is sharp, with some very funny exchanges between the two leads. Garcia is deliberately over the top, with Johnson acting as a counterbalance to the machismo. He will explain game mechanics, like goats being a source of light, or narrate demon fables scattered around the underworld. His explanations do add some context to the madness. But at one point, Garcia says "I am not even going to ask how that makes sense", which is definitely the best approach when playing this game.

Visuals are superb, despite the odd glitch. Lighting in particular is outstanding. Unsurprisingly, the game has some truly haunting music. Atmosphere is expertly conveyed by the audio, and creates a unique experience. Gameplay is very solid, primarily the Resident Evil, over the shoulder viewpoint, but turns into a side scrolling shooter at certain points. There's some memorable level design, such as navigating across a giant, semi naked gyrating lady. However, some sections do feel generic. Many areas lock upon entry and require all enemies are destroyed before the path re-opens. Keys and locks are also heavily used. Shrieking baby faces guard gates of the underworld, and are impartial to being fed specific foods, like strawberry's or brains. It's entertaining, but hasn't advanced from archaic `red key card', `blue key card' puzzles.

The weapon set is a limited but focused collection, with demonic equivalents of a pistol, shotgun and machine gun, which are upgraded during the course of the game to allow greater power and secondary modes. Red Gems upgrade statistics, and are hidden throughout the game, or can be purchased from a demon trader named Christopher. Enemy design is fantastic, especially some of the later creatures. Each individual boss is a memorable creation, but the tactics required to defeat them all follow a similar design, which does get a little predictable. Sadly, there is no replay value once the story has been completed. No New Game+ exists, or even a level select facility. It's sorely lacking a challenge mode or multiplayer options. However, obtaining the Platinum will require 3 plays, (one for each difficulty as they don't stack).

After a non-existent marketing campaign, it's unsurprising this hasn't sold well. But Shadows of the Damned is refreshingly original, and absolutely deserves your attention.

I'll start by saying this - if you're on this page, reading this review then you'll probably enjoy the game because it must have something that you are interested in. If this is the case, buy it! It deserves to have your money and support as it is one of the rare pieces of truly unique material in its genre... Now, onto the review.

Story: You play a demon hunter who goes through hell (literally) to try and rescue his girlfriend from the lord of the underworld who is intent on making her suffer for eternity. You are alone against a world of demons, your only companion being your rude, wise cracking, shape shifting sidekick/all purpose tool Johnson. While the story itself isn't very deep, along your journey you'll learn about the customs, taboos and history of Hell by talking to Johnson and examining the posters and books scattered through the cobblestone streets and fiery caverns of the underworld. This really adds to the experience, making the world around you seem that much more tangible.

The characters in the game are some of the best I've seen in a while and they really make the experience much more enjoyable. The playful banter between the hero, Garcia, and his skull sidekick Johnson makes it so that even when you aren't slaughtering hoards of monsters, the game doesn't ever get dull, and their puerile and often immature comments on the world around them injects some humor into the bleak, horror filled areas they traverse. This also allows the characters to develop well and you'll see from the early stages that Garcia is not just a badass, tough talking demon hunter, he also has a strong sense of justice and cares deeply about his loved ones.

Gameplay: The game plays like a cross between Resident Evil 4 and Dead Space. You move with the left control stick and rotate the camera with the right. L1 allows you to aim and R1 fires (but unlike RE4 you are not static while aiming, a welcome change). You have a small selection of weapons which can be changed with the D-Pad, a melee attack, a dodge roll, and a button to use healing items. The control of the character was, for me at least, flawless and felt very fluid. I never found myself struggling against awkward camera angles or the character not doing what I wanted him to do. It feels like a slick, polished version of RE4.

There are some fairly simple puzzles to solve which usually involve destroying a certain object or finding a certain item, but these are VERY easily solved as the game is very linear - you'll not find any diverging paths or optional areas to explore besides the occasional extra room or small alcove.

The game is split into Acts, and each act has a number of sections. These sections typically see you killing demons and solving those simple puzzles before fighting a boss to end the act. There are regular checkpoints throughout the entire game and no penalty for dying (apart from the progress you lose by going back to the last checkpoint, obviously), so there's not a lot of pressure on the player to succeed at every battle.

You can upgrade your guns' stats, your melee attack and your health using red gems found lying around hell. Your weapons are also physically altered by the blue gems you receive throughout the game, giving them new abilities. However I found this to be annoying at times as you are forced to accept these changes, one of which effectively ruined one of the guns for me.

Boss fights start off very interesting, for example at an early part of the game you battle a 50 foot tall minotaur that urinates pure darkness, however they soon become quite boring and amount to nothing more than shooting the red weak spot.

Sound: Akira Yamaoka of the Silent Hill series made the soundtrack for Shadows, and put simply it is fantastic. It fits the atmosphere of the world you are in and really pulls you in. The voice acting is brilliant and brings the characters to life, and the sound effects fit in perfectly (although some are lifted from Silent Hill.)

Content/Replayability: This is the first game in a long time that I have wanted to play again as soon as I finished it for the first time. This is partly because it is an incredibly fun, enjoyable game and partly because it left me wanting more. I finished it in around 7 hours on both normal and hard mode, and there is nothing to do outside of the main story bar collecting trophies (but this isn't something that interests me).

There also aren't really any alternate ways to play the game - you are given 3 weapons and nothing else. You cant try out different weapons/items/strategies like you can in some other games (Bioshock is a good example, lots to play around with there) because there aren't any. So unless some DLC is released, the only way you can spice up the game is to impose rules upon yourself (e.g. use only 1 weapon, don't heal etc). There's also no new game+ feature, which seems to put many players off as it makes collecting red gems more difficult.

Conclusion: Overall, Shadows of the Damned is an excellent game which mixes some of the most bizarre and horrifying monsters I've ever seen with some of the most immature humor I've ever come across. The simply story is backed up by a well developed cast of characters and small touches that give the world depth. The gameplay is smooth and interesting but gets repetitive at times (though thats not to say there aren't a few curve balls thrown in), and the music, sound effects and voice acting are all top notch. The only problem I have with the game is that it is short and there's not much to do outside the main story, or to put it in the game's innuendo laden style of humor - it's good for a quick ride but not big enough to completely satisfy me.

(Thanks for reading!)

Shadows Of The Damned knows exactly what it wants from life - or, more accurately, death. Where some other games play requiems on your tender heartstrings and prod your emotions, this third-person road trip to hell (from the minds of Resi's Shinji Mikami and Killer7 creator Suda51) wants to jack you into the mains and play a screaming drum solo on your frazzled soft bits. Does it succeed? Not quite.

You play Garcia Hotspur, killer of demons, wearer of leather, lover of imperilled girlfriend Paula. He comes home from a day of devil merking to find his sweetheart swinging from the ceiling fan while his knob-headed nemesis Fleming drags her soul to the underworld. Fleming is the Lord Of Demons, and he's grown tired of Hotspur's obssession with wiping out his minions, so as a punishment he condemns Garcia's special lady to an eternity of beheading, cannibalism and disappointing puddings. This leads Garcia to re-evaluate his life, opening up a Heavy Rain-style exploration of loss and the nature of faith. No, of COURSE it doesn't. He takes the highway to hell with his Johnson in hand - we'll get to that next - in order to rescue Paula and kick every demon ass he can find.

Everyone knows that it's not possible to fight demons using conventional weaponry, so Garcia is accompanied by Johnson, a flaming demon skull with a camp English accent and the ability to morph into an arsenal of spectre-shredding firearms. Johnson is an exile of the underworld who acts as Garcia's tour guide through the shadowy vision of hell - think of it as a buddy cop movie where all the criminals are rotting corpses and your partner is an oversexed severed head with a rude-sounding name. You can think of that, right?

The first time you squeeze your Johnson (that's the last one, I promise), Mikami's influence becomes clear - Shadows Of The Damned plays EXACTLY like Resident Evil 4. Johnson has a laser sight that's perfect for popping the heads of lurching demons, and their slow shuffling strongly recalls the snarling approach of the Ganados.

Unfortunately, Shadows Of The Damned is a greasy trudge through a laborious underworld rather than the thunderous shoot-out that was promised. It often feels more middle management than middle finger: progression requires grinding busywork, such as shooting distant lanterns or gunning through a predetermined number of enemies. It's not quite as tired as the old 'invisible wall' trick, but there's only one reason why killing 17 demons should open door number 666: lazy design. Garcia is hand-crafted from awesome to kick demonic ass, so why make him a glorified doorman?

At times the game seems at pains to deliberately halt your progress. Your path is frequently blocked by demonic, baby-faced doors that can only be opened by feeding them eyeballs, brains or strawberries (they're made of ground tongue, apparently) so holy retribution often turns into an offal hunt. There's only ever one way of progressing through each level, and the linear gameplay is almost totally at odds with the rebellious, punk-rock representation. Far from being a wild ride through the highways of hell, this feels more like a stop-start trundle on My First Trike through the most accommodating afterlife imaginable.

For every aspect of the presentation that's impressive - climbing over a gigantic, writhing version of Paula, demon bowling with a giant skull - there's something glum to counteract it. The slimy visuals make Garcia's trudge through hell hard on the eyes, but more irritating is the red ring that engulfs the screen as you take damage. Do you know what I absolutely DON'T need when I'm battling for my soul in the goddamned swamps of hell? A massive red sphincter that obscures half my view and makes fighting even more difficult. Worse still, the best ideas are always milked dry - a stylish 2D shooter section works as a clever distraction, but it's overused. When you eventually get your hands on the Big Boner (a massive, phallic extension of Johnson) the giant-killing jaunt that follows is stretched beyond the limits of enjoyment. Too often, Shadows Of The Damned does so much that's it's tiresome - the colours are too bright, the noises too noisy, the boners too big.

Possibly the most disappointing aspect of Shadows is that we know these developers could have made this awesome. Suda51's mix of satire and insanity worked to glorious excess in Killer7. Composer Akira Yamaoka's audio on Silent Hill remains the most terrifying aspect of that game. Mikami took survival horror from a niche genre and brought it to the mainstream. And yet with their powers combined, they've created a cacophony of bleating goats and over-saturated horror that barely conceals an average game.

So why a 3 star rating? Because if this were a film, I'd be congratulating it on being a riotous, consistently self-aware parody. But like recent Grindhouse homages, it draws inspiration from a long-dead genre that feels increasingly irrelevant; and there's nothing here that improves on the source material. Shadows Of The Damned should be reaching new levels of excess, pushing boundaries until they snap like agonisingly stretched tendons. Unfortunately, it's over-the-top in every place except where it truly matters: the gameplay. It might be dressed up like a rebellious version of Resident Evil, but underneath the leather jacket is a familiar, unbearably loud cardigan.