The bottom line is that this game is incredibly annoying.
The audio design is composed of the sound of crying (then laughing) babies, stock zombie roars, and out-of-place swearing repeated ad nauseum.
The hurdles you encounter are not challenges more than they are inconveniences, the mini-games control poorly and any uniqueness in their design is quickly overshadowed by their repetition and length. The bosses are not difficult, just well-conceptualized puppets with a glowing weak spot you have to hit too many times before they make a dick joke and go into their next phase and you shoot more.
Mini-bosses are worse, often the design is not intuitive enough to tell what you're supposed to do, and when you finally do figure it out the loop goes on far too long to the point where you question whether or not you ARE doing the right thing.
I spent 8 minutes on a fight with a generic big zombie, I went through 68 bullets shooting it with lightshot then blasting it in the back while it was stunned. It took my entire full stock of shotgun ammo to kill it, plus some from my handgun. It did not move for the entire fight save for the stun animation. I did not move either. We were locked for 8 minutes in a still, silent dance to the death.
It was not fun.
The final boss (I have since been informed that this is NOT the final boss, but the pre-final boss) took me an hour, you have to unload clips into him so he'll split into three pieces and spin around you too fast to aim, but not at a consistent speed, so you can't try and match his pace. The laser pointer reticle cannot find his hit boxes. When you do hit the shots, it's only a few before he re-forms and you have to keep shooting til he splits and spins again. I ended up quitting because I'd run out of alcohol (in-game, the healing item, I mean, I'd drunk approximately 50 bottles of various effects in this encounter), and if it had taken me an hour to get through just 2/3 of the fight (judging by the spinning pieces remaining) I didn't have it in me to do that again. My spirit had been broken. I was drinking tea this entire time in an attempt to stay calm and collected and patient. My tea had gone cold. I googled a video of the ending cutscene and went to sleep. Tomorrow I will play Dragon Quest XI and have a much, much better time. It will be therapeutic. I will forget Shadows of the Damned overnight.
The dialogue is irritating and provides no bond between the characters. We know Garcia loves his girlfriend because he is a man and she is a woman and they are both hot and the game talks about sex a lot. He also likes her caprese salad, as we learn in a throwaway line that ends in a half-assed oral joke.
Johnson is not a character, he is a dick joke. The only tension between characters is either a given sexual baseline spawned from a middle school boy's imagination, or else a threat of masculinity between two Big Beefy Boys who want to Have Sex with Women, but are being Cockblocked by the Devil (this is the name of my new indie band, debuting this April at the bar's open mic night).
The two variations of cutscene are "men make references to the fact that they have penises, then get angry," or "woman is tortured and assaulted for shock value." Poignant music is played over a scene of the latter, while a demon repeats the words "fuck youuuu" more times than I would be comfortable writing in an entire script of any length, let alone one scene of this length. Two jokes of masculinity watch this event, one shooting guns solemnly while the other stands with his dick in his hand. This is not a joke, Johnson is a phallis. He is in Garcia's hand constantly. This is the smartest subliminal messaging the game is capable of, and it's just a play on the phrase "just standing around with your dick in your hand."
There are QTEs that just happen, without you realizing what's happening until it's too late. There are crying babies, frequently. They do not stop crying, or laughing, sometimes for the duration of a miniboss fight. As I've established, that time frame is unbearable. Johnson just says things, so does Garcia. These things do not matter. There is no story in this game. All you need to know is that sex exists, in the real world, and EA loves it. That's the plot of Shadows of the Damned.
This game has boobs in it.
The audio design is composed of the sound of crying (then laughing) babies, stock zombie roars, and out-of-place swearing repeated ad nauseum.
The hurdles you encounter are not challenges more than they are inconveniences, the mini-games control poorly and any uniqueness in their design is quickly overshadowed by their repetition and length. The bosses are not difficult, just well-conceptualized puppets with a glowing weak spot you have to hit too many times before they make a dick joke and go into their next phase and you shoot more.
Mini-bosses are worse, often the design is not intuitive enough to tell what you're supposed to do, and when you finally do figure it out the loop goes on far too long to the point where you question whether or not you ARE doing the right thing.
I spent 8 minutes on a fight with a generic big zombie, I went through 68 bullets shooting it with lightshot then blasting it in the back while it was stunned. It took my entire full stock of shotgun ammo to kill it, plus some from my handgun. It did not move for the entire fight save for the stun animation. I did not move either. We were locked for 8 minutes in a still, silent dance to the death.
It was not fun.
The final boss (I have since been informed that this is NOT the final boss, but the pre-final boss) took me an hour, you have to unload clips into him so he'll split into three pieces and spin around you too fast to aim, but not at a consistent speed, so you can't try and match his pace. The laser pointer reticle cannot find his hit boxes. When you do hit the shots, it's only a few before he re-forms and you have to keep shooting til he splits and spins again. I ended up quitting because I'd run out of alcohol (in-game, the healing item, I mean, I'd drunk approximately 50 bottles of various effects in this encounter), and if it had taken me an hour to get through just 2/3 of the fight (judging by the spinning pieces remaining) I didn't have it in me to do that again. My spirit had been broken. I was drinking tea this entire time in an attempt to stay calm and collected and patient. My tea had gone cold. I googled a video of the ending cutscene and went to sleep. Tomorrow I will play Dragon Quest XI and have a much, much better time. It will be therapeutic. I will forget Shadows of the Damned overnight.
The dialogue is irritating and provides no bond between the characters. We know Garcia loves his girlfriend because he is a man and she is a woman and they are both hot and the game talks about sex a lot. He also likes her caprese salad, as we learn in a throwaway line that ends in a half-assed oral joke.
Johnson is not a character, he is a dick joke. The only tension between characters is either a given sexual baseline spawned from a middle school boy's imagination, or else a threat of masculinity between two Big Beefy Boys who want to Have Sex with Women, but are being Cockblocked by the Devil (this is the name of my new indie band, debuting this April at the bar's open mic night).
The two variations of cutscene are "men make references to the fact that they have penises, then get angry," or "woman is tortured and assaulted for shock value." Poignant music is played over a scene of the latter, while a demon repeats the words "fuck youuuu" more times than I would be comfortable writing in an entire script of any length, let alone one scene of this length. Two jokes of masculinity watch this event, one shooting guns solemnly while the other stands with his dick in his hand. This is not a joke, Johnson is a phallis. He is in Garcia's hand constantly. This is the smartest subliminal messaging the game is capable of, and it's just a play on the phrase "just standing around with your dick in your hand."
There are QTEs that just happen, without you realizing what's happening until it's too late. There are crying babies, frequently. They do not stop crying, or laughing, sometimes for the duration of a miniboss fight. As I've established, that time frame is unbearable. Johnson just says things, so does Garcia. These things do not matter. There is no story in this game. All you need to know is that sex exists, in the real world, and EA loves it. That's the plot of Shadows of the Damned.
This game has boobs in it.