Dobry klon REIV z ery X360. Szkoda, że Suda 51 nie zrobił więcej takich gier.

Plusy i minusy:
+ fajny, niepoprawny dzisiaj humor i ogólny brak cenzury...
- choć czasami aż za bardzo "edgy"
+ postacie i ich śmieszne dialogi
+ muzyka
+ dziwaczny design postaci i świata
+ jedna zapadająca w pamięć, świetna walka z bossem (rzeźnik)
- prostacka relacja głównego bohatera z ukochaną (dużo ślepego ganiania za gołą dupą)
- bardzo słabe gameplayowo poziomy w 2D, czuć że to sztuczne wydłużanie rozgrywki o coś zrobionego jak najniższym kosztem
- zakończenie takie sobie

A little on the janky and budget feeling side. Feels like a game with troubled development. Some of the humor has aged a little for me.

Despite that though, the game still fucking rules. The style is super sick and the music is some of my favorite Yamaoka tracks. Anything that's basically a low-rent RE4 is my jam too.

Really hoping to see a full sequel to this beyond the admittedly cool "sequel" in Travis Strikes Again.

This was my very first Suda51/Grasshopper Manufacture title, and it was a damn good one. Now, this game isn't going to go down in history as one of the all time greats, but god if it isn't a fun time. This game oozes atmosphere, and going through hell looking for your girlfriend is such a cool plot to play through, if paper thin in terms of subtext and themes. Obviously I would have preferred Suda51's original concept called Kurayami, but alas EA struck again. Regardless, if you like action shooters, and can cope with the fun, but admittedly a little cringy humour, then you should have a grand old time. If you're anything other than a casual gamer though, I'd recommend playing on the hardest difficulty, as easy and normal are a breeze.

I really like it when a game isn’t for everyone. Look at the games that are made for everyone and you’ll get a good idea of why. Games made for the masses, the biggest possible audience usually follow market trends in terms of structure, interactions and genre. It does not necessarily dictate the quality of the product but there’s a certain framework that a lot of them follow. Not one of these games will contain a sequence where you fire a gigantic cannon, held at groin level, called the ‘Big Boner’ at huge enemies in a neon cityscape, will have you running across the gyrating bodies of kaiju-sized women and jumping into a papercraft shmup segment.

Shadows of the Damned is a miracle of a game. A game created by three Japanese gaming icons - Shinji Mikami, Goichi Suda (Suda51) and Akira Yamaoka - and released by, of all people, EA. It is unapologetically crass, violent and wears its grindhouse cinema influences on the sleeve of its leather jacket. A lot of people are going to play it and find it to be immature. Many will find the bloody violence towards women and general titillation throughout the game to be misogynistic. It is a videogame that a large section of the consumer base just isn’t going to enjoy at all for a whole load of reasons and, for that reason, I absolutely love it.

Now of course, I get that as a straight white lad I’m in a position where I can afford to not be put off by the content in Shadows of the Damned. I’m also in a position where I can point out these aspects and perhaps, not support it. I would be lying to you, dear reader, if I said that was the case. Shadows of the Damned is a problematic fave - sitting alongside my penchant for grotesque international horror, paedophile hunting videos on YouTube and big naturals. It’s a love letter to a style of movie that, for all the reasons you’d expect, will never be mass market but is still enjoyed by a whole host of people.

The game very much is the sum of its creators’s DNA. It doesn’t feel quite like the evolution of the Resident Evil 4 formula that The Evil Within is, sitting somewhere between the two games, partly due to it being shackled to the more ‘creative’ moments straight from the mind of Suda51. The thing about Suda51 is that his games are never perfect but not a single thing is by accident. It never reaches out and out survival horror due to a leaning towards action and one-off setpieces. There’s always something during each combat scenario that messes with what would otherwise be a serviceable Resident Evil 4-a-like and keeps feeling a lot more unique. Not all of these stick the landing, but that’s where the charm lies.

There’s combat puzzles that utilise the game’s darkness mechanic - a blue fog that drains your health if you spend too much time in it - allowing you to see targets you need to progress or a bosses weak spot. Chase sequences that end up with a very on the nose homage to The Evil Dead. The aforementioned ‘Big Boner’ sequence, essentially a turret section and, honestly, one of the weaker points in the game. Using one of the weapon’s upgrades to play Pachinko and Bowling. There’s always something happening that keeps you guessing and keeps you having to think about how to use the Resi 4 style combat in new, refreshing ways. Sometimes, it doesn’t quite work - but it is always trying something.

Weapons upgrade at specific points during the game so you can’t miss any, nor have to pick and choose, so there’s more scope for tailoring combat encounters to an arsenal the game knows you have. Although you CAN stick to one weapon for most of the playthrough, you’re encouraged to chop and change between them and utilise the best one for each situation and figuring out which one is the best - or your favourite - to deal with what is thrown at you is very rewarding and something that very clearly was expanded upon with The Evil Within, when Mikami wasn’t beholden to Suda51’s wonderful brain.

I need to make this clear, when I say that the progression in regards to the combat and game structure from Resident Evil 4 was held back by Suda51’s ideas, I personally do not consider that a bad thing. The Evil Within is a great, probably a bit underrated game, that allowed Mikami to ramp up both the horror and action aspects of the formula he created with that brilliant fourth Resident Evil game but Shadows of the Damned has its own completely unique charm and a lot of that is entirely down to Suda51’s own ideas for the game.

It all looks and sounds so good, too. The hellscape you fight your way through is equal parts grim and dark and neon and surreal. Enemies are horrific one second and almost hilarious the next. It is violent and disgusting but full of black comedy. Suda51 set out to riff on the trashy vibe of American Grindhouse movies and nailed it, warts and all. The four major characters - the brilliantly named protagonist Garcia Hotspur and his talking gun and sidekick Johnson (and yes, that’s a dick joke), Garcia’s captured girlfriend Paula and the big bad Fleming, who is so over the top in his threats to cause all sorts of evil acts to Paula he’s a superb, almost camp-y horror villain.

The music is by Silent Hill soundtrack legend Akira Yamaoka and, although plenty of it is that atmospheric, somber guitar driven stuff from the Silent Hill OSTs, there’s plenty of industrial noise and straight up punk and rock here, all of it perfectly suiting the tone of the game. It is probably Yamaoka’s most underappreciated work - the Silent Hill games getting deserved high praise but for my money, this absolutely stands shoulder to shoulder with the stuff he wrote for the third and fourth games in that series.

From the aesthetic that riffs on a cult genre of movies full of things that many find a bit distasteful to the actual gameplay that feels like it is occasionally at odds with the ideas and encounters you come across, it is a tough one to recommend. It is far from a bad game but definitely quite divisive. The Grindhouse styling might put you off. You may find it inferior to Mikami’s other forays into survival horror. What can I say, it isn’t for everyone. It is, however, absolutely for me.

I like it more than I thought I would, considering Suda's games never really jive with me. I attribute that almost entirely to its presentation. This game had a lot of heart and was genuinely funny at just how baffling shit was at times. That zaniness never really hit in his other games, but the delivery of lines invoked a lot of charm that is much needed with this style of humour. It doesn't hit all of the time, and can be rather stupid even, but even then the absurdity had some value for me. Unfortunately the act of play just didn't feel all that great. The bosses were easy, and all followed a similar gimmick of just getting them to their respective breaking points to uncover the shiny red weak point. The standard combat did present more of a challenge from time to time, but a lot of the challenge came from struggling with unresponsive radial menus. I didn't feel like I learned anything new from each failure besides trying to heal much earlier than I thought I needed to avoid futsing with the game reading an input at an inconvenient moment. With more polish I honestly think I would love this game, and perhaps more Grasshopper games, but that doesn't seem like something they allow themselves unfortunately, or rather those they end up working with in this case.

Shadows of the Damned is what you get when you mix the gameplay of Resident Evil 4 with the story of Dante's Inferno and the type of humor you would expect in a Deadpool property.

It's plenty of fun. The graphics seem to hold up well for the time. It's plenty colorful, literally and in terms of character. And it's a terribly easy game making it a breeze to play through. I didn't even realize I was on the hardest difficulty until I was nearly to the final boss. The boss fights are easy but frustrating for how long they take. After you rinse and repeat the same action and process for what feels like the umpteenth time you desperately want nothing more than the fight to be over with. It's not a test of skill but rather of patience.

The game also reminded me a ton of Lollipop Chainsaw in terms of tone and style which makes sense because after I finished the game I discovered that both were Suda 51 projects. I liked this a hell of a lot more than Lollipop Chainsaw though. No pun intended.

A Japanese game that stars a Mexican character voiced by a White American is an interesting decision to say the least. I feel like that wouldn't fly in 2020 but snuck under the radar in 2011. I didn't love Blum's voicework on this. I'm a huge fan of him as Wolverine but he was just distracting in this. I quite enjoyed the voice actor for the character of Johnson though.

This game felt janky at times and like it needed a bit more polish. I hated the camera placement which made it hard to see at times but they balanced that with terrible AI hitbox detection. You could simply barely move to any direction and it would cause the enemy attack animation to miss. Again this game was terribly easy.

Overall it was fun, interesting, and original enough. I'm glad I played this game and it was a hell of a lot better than a lot of similar crap I've played from this era. I really like 3rd person horror shooters and while this was on the lesser end of that spectrum it was still a solid enough game.

came dressed in black ready to mourn immense creative stifling by the casual, profit-driven tyranny of western publishers, stayed for akira yamaoka's godlike score and for the comic and raunchy but often unrealized attempts to jab at the medium's hypermasculine paragons

if you haven't read kurayami dance and have any interest in suda or in this game's behind-the-scenes progression from kafkaesque horror to b-movie grindhouse romp, id highly suggest you do because it's insane how much of the language and iconography of that manga (itself a conceptual iteration on kurayami, a separate project that never saw realization, and the initial vision suda had for SOTD prior to ea's chokehold on creative direction) is reflected here; the manga presents a lovely middle ground between the two diametrically opposed visions at the core of SOTD's inception. shared in common are the ideas of an easy ride-influenced road trip, a talkative otherworldly companion, a journey through supernatural planes of existence, a mysterious castle separate from the general populace, and a few other smaller commonalities. still, SOTD opts for a much less thematically complete endeavour (with its sardonic and satirical throughlines of male insecurity as it relates to female sexuality feeling largely uninterrogated), and considering the pedigree behind the project it's shocking the gameplay really isn't up to snuff at all either, so it's harder to enjoy as just a thrilling and cheesy adventure. mikami somehow turned in a dull third person shooter with finicky controls and mechanics that trivialize the vast majority of the combat scenarios

it's difficult to fault any of this - reading kurayami dance, one gets the sense that suda wanted to make something more in line with flower, sun, and rain again and simply couldn't because EA didnt see those ideas as trendy or appealing to western markets - but it's a shame the end result is a poor experience that appealed to no one if sales data is anything to go by, that hasn't aged especially gracefully, and that games criticism of its era struggled to sum up, reconcile with, or effectively assess. the most common criticism was so of its time it almost hurts - the lack of a new game+ feature. no discussion of narrative, stilted mechanics, corporate meddling, what have you. just a run of the mill release to throw into the 7/10 pile and forget.

of the titles suda had a hand in in the early 2010s, produced in his absence from the director's seat, this is probably my second favourite, but it's really not saying much. there's interesting insight from the development of killer is dead that showcases yet more publisher strangulation - the implementation of gigolo mode, mandated by kadokawa. what's interesting here is that, commenting on gigolo modes inclusion, suda explicitly acknowledged that these features would probably harm grasshoppers reputation, especially when taken in conjunction with both this game and no more heroes 2, but there wasn't much he could do about it. that lack of control speaks volumes about the experiences on offer, and SOTD is the poster boy for that fraught process. playing through the game, i can say that as interesting as it could be at times? thank god that eras over and that grasshopper is moving on to self-publishing. at this rate, you'd be better off reading kurayami dance and playing travis strikes again than trying your hand at SOTD, both of which are more interesting to experience, are far more emotionally affecting, and reflect on this title in interesting ways. dissociative identity might be a trademark of sudas works, but it's always bleak when the game itself is undergoing an overt identity crisis