Shadows of the Damned Review for PS3 and Xbox360

     Shadows of the Damned was the first project released after Grasshopper Manufacture acquired some new talent for their studio and larger publishers were willing to take a risk on Goichi Suda's (Suda51 (Of No More Heroes, Killer 7 fame)) eclectic and bizarre creations. I have to think that Shadows of the Damned is something Suda51 must be prideful of; It's the first game Akira Yamaoka (Composer famous for scoring the Silent Hill series) was involved with after leaving Konami to be hired by Grasshopper Manufacture as well as enlisting the talent of the great Shinji Mikami (Director/Producer of Resident Evil, Vanquish, Phoenix Wright, and God Hand just to name a few), and to top it off, it's the first Grasshopper Manufacture title to be published by a huge company, namely EA in this case. If there's a time for Suda51 to strut his stuff and show what he can do with a team of visionary Japanese developers, this game would be the right time to do so.


Non-Gameplay Stuffs    

     Shadows of the Damned focuses on the story of demon hunter, Garcia Hotspur, who has had his beloved Paula taken away from him by Fleming, the ruler of Hell. With Garcia's sidekick, Johnson, a joke-cracking, transforming, flaming skull, they chase Fleming into the depths of the underworld to rescue Paula. Despite a rather serious open scene where Garcia offs a demon and comes home to find Paula hung from the ceiling fan of their bedroom, the mood is quickly done away with in service of endless penis jokes. Penises in general are a huge recurring theme in Shadows of the Damned. Fleming compares his huge staff to your small gun the way one would sophomorically compare their girth and size against another man's junk, the flying, one-eyed creature in charge of checkpointing your progress is named One-Eyed William, Certain doors are blocked off by "demon pubes" which you send away by shooting a giant orb attached to the pubes by an organic cord of some sort which brings to mind a testicle, your health bar and ammo count are represented in such a way that mimics an erect penis, Johnson has the power to transform into guns such as the "Boner" and "Teether," the examples go on and on. This is definitely a game for a mature audience and if you're opposed to jokes or content of a sexual nature, I suggest never loading this game into your disc-tray. If you're down for some clever and crude humor though, you're in for a treat.

      It's bizarre how irreverent the humor of the game is to the tone of its story and dark events, something that works in service of its charm, and occasionally to its detriment. As you trek through hell you'll come across Paula a number of times as she's decapitated, devoured, and drowned and Johnson usually has a witty remark to follow the grisly scene with. For instance, a demon forces her way through Paula by ripping her body to pieces from the inside to which Johnson says, "Inside every good girl is a bad girl just waiting to get out." How appropriate. The script is made up of innuendos, sexual word-play, curses, and dirty words. Surprisingly though, its all delivered in such a fun, light-hearted way. I've experienced being offended or turned away by certain topics (I'd like to point out the disdain I hold for the writing of Ninja Theory's DmC) but Shadows of the Damned has a way of making offensive remarks part of its charm in a unique way that shows it has heart.
     The unique blend doesn't stop there. The art of the world and Akira Yamaoka's score come together to create moments that repulse and overwhelm. Hell features numerous scenes of graphic violence- piles of body parts, skewered heads, dining tables set with pools of blood and half-eaten corpses- This Hell isn't holding back. Even grosser is that while there are conventional structures like houses made from conventional materials like brick and wood, there's always something to remind you that the majority of what surrounds you is made up of flesh and guts. There's one house thats insides are made up of what is essentially some portal into what I can only assume is the digestive tract of some huge demon.
     The music accompanying this scenery is made up of contemplative urban beats, ethereal and dreamlike, sometimes you have to stop playing just to take the moment in. Then, in an instant, there's a huge scream and you've been ambushed and the music sounds like it's trying just as hard to kill you as the demon horde closing in on you. Paired with an environment full of darkness and violence, it does a good job of luring you into a false sense of security before pulling the ground out from under you, sending you hurtling into a world of panic and fear. I've embedded a video of my gameplay that illustrates this dichotomy of emotion through sound below. Have a look, it's spoiler-free.

     Through such a presentation, you end up with something very provocative. In one moment you're feeling a bit afraid of what lurks around the corner and you're laughing your ass off at a joke in the next. The issue that comes up for me though is that it's this clash of drama and comedy that removes me from empathizing with the characters of the story and recognizing the serious undertones of the plot itself. It's disappointing because there's a lot of emotional weight that could be placed on the player with a number of moments cashing in on our investment in the story but it fails to do so since every moment has it's own witty dialogue to make light of it. So in that sense, it loses the chance to make a larger emotional impact on the audience.

Gameplay Bits

     If you've played any Shinji Mikami third-person shooter, then you should be pretty familiar with the mechanics of Shadows of the Damned. You can run, shoot, melee, do a contextual button-press finisher (of which the variety is plentiful), dodge roll in any of four different directions, and heal yourself on the spot (with booze). There are no inventory menus to load or get lost in. You choose your weapons and healing items on the fly with the d-pad. There are three gun types to use: A pistol, a shotgun, and a machine gun. While these guns do have their own purposed utility, you'll find that you'll probably stick to the pistol for the majority of the game. Unfortunately, the game wasn't designed in a way to encourage varied use of your weapons. I'll get to that in a moment but let's take a glance at some unique features in the game's combat.
     Shadows of the Damned features a little bit of play on light and darkness. Demons don't like the light so they'll do what they can to dim the area. Luckily, Johnson has the ability to shoot a flaming shot to light up the way. There are two different spins on this in the game. The first involves actual barriers of darkness that once entered begin to drain your health. Any demons within these areas become cloaked in darkness and are impervious to damage. To clear a barrier, you have to find a wall-mounted goat's head (which, as everyone knows, are a great source of light in the underworld) and set it aflame with Johnson's innate ability and then proceed to dispel cloaks of darkness on demons with said ability. Another spin involves a demure, twisted version of an angler fish called a Sushi Lamp. Sushi Lamps appear before areas that don't necessarily have darkness barriers but are literally so dark you can't see what's directly in front of you. Fear not, all it takes is a flame-shot to light the sucker up and he'll ferry you through the darkness to brighter, not necessarily greener, pastures. As you go through the darkness, you need to be on the lookout for the eyes of demons so you can protect yourself. However, as long as you stay in the light demons are more likely to cower away from you although there comes a point in the game where it does away with your security. I'll let that be a surprise though.

     Another mechanic of the flame shot is that it freezes demons in place so you can get a quick, calculated shot in. Demons are affected by headshots or shooting off their limbs and you get different rewards or changes in attack depending on what you shoot off. If you freeze a demon with a vulnerable cranium, you can finish them off immediately with a button-prompted melee. The flame shot is also used to interact with certain puzzles and expose weaknesses on bosses. It's got some nice utility.
     Then there's everything I think is off about the gameplay. Let's first go back to my statement about lack of gunplay variety. To explain, there are two items that are valuable to the player: white gems and red gems. White gems are the currency of the game and red gems are "Performance Enhancers," allowing you to upgrade your weapons' strength, capacity, reload speed, your health, etc. You can either find red gems in hidden areas or you can pay 120 white gems to receive a red gem. As for obtaining white gems, you can find them in breakable barrels and boxes but you'll get most of them through your killing of demons. If you destroy or headshot a demon, you get about 2-3 white gems. If you blow off a leg, they fall to the floor which enables you to stomp on them to drain whatever health they have before you jump on them to obliterate the demon once and for all. For every stomp, you get one white gem and 2-3 on the final jump. If the demon goes straight to the ground, you can count on about three stomps before the finisher which means at least five white diamonds in your pocket. If you hit them anywhere else before getting them on the floor though it's possible you'll just end up finishing them without stomping at all. Essentially, if you want to get the most out of every demon, you need to shoot their leg out and stomp them to death for the most payoff.
     Unfortunately, the pistol is about the only good weapon for this. The shotgun just explodes demons into chunks and the machine gun is too inaccurate to rely on for hitting those thin demon legs. And even outside of this, the pistol's the most reliable of the three anyway. It has the quickest reload and the best damage given the short recovery needed for each shot and its rate of fire. The machine gun is eventually upgraded to be less accurate so that makes it a no-no for precision shooting with bosses and such. The shotgun's more like a rocket launcher in that it shoots off a huge, damaging skull that slowly glides towards the target instead of an instant spread of buckshot. That skull's got a huge radius too so it usually ends up hitting an invincible area surrounding a weak point although it's so hard to visually gauge whether the shot was successful or not, you could go on assuming every attempt is a failed one. To make things even more boring, the guns remain the same as they are from the start with the exception of certain features that are best used for puzzles than in combat, and even then, they're buggy.
     This game is in need of some polish. At certain points, there's just too much going wrong to let go and that's mostly to do with wonky hit detection and reactions. Most of this is to do with one of the upgrades you get for the handgun which is essentially a gooey bomb that you attach to cracked surfaces and impenetrable armor on enemies and then give it a shot to make it combust. There are plenty of times where you'll fire it off and it'll stick to another place instead of where it hit, it'll go invisible, it'll be visible but can't be shot, it's possible for it to do no damage when it combusts, it's pretty much broken.
     Some enemies have weird hitboxes on their attacks where they'll clearly have hit you but apparently the game has registered it as a miss so I assume that the point of damage on their attack is much too small or too short. There's another enemy that you have to flame shot to have him turn around to shoot his weak-point but the amount of time he stays turned seems entirely random. And then there's this stuff:

     So, yeah... It needed a bit more time in the oven I think.

Other bits and bobs

     I love the menus and all of the art that goes along with them. There's a wonderful papier-mache feel with some pop-up storybook and shadow puppet influences. The bosses are rather interesting, especially with the fairytale books that go along with them to explain their background. Johnson and Garcia also do some fantastic narration for these tales. It's a shame that a lot of the bosses consist of one-note battles that are more repetitive than actually challenging. The last two bosses were a bit annoying being that I had to weather through wonky hit detection and weapons with insufficient means of dealing damage to get through them.
     I also think that the voice acting is superbly camp. I'm so pleased that Suda51 usually manages some great localization talent for his games so that dialogue can flow well and be voiced in such intriguing ways. I dunno, I just think it's done particularly well.

So Overall?

     Shadows of the Damned is a good game. It is most definitely, without a doubt, deserving of a run through whether you have to buy it or rent it. It offers something unique and off-the-wall which is something we still lack in today's game space so I almost think it's worth it in that regard alone.I don't think Shadows of the Damned was everything we expected or wanted it to be but its got some great characters, it was entertaining, fun (albeit at times rage-worthy), and now I'm going to see penises everywhere.

     If you need more convincing, maybe you'd like to see a bit of gameplay. Visit my Twitch channel to see my review playthrough of Shadows of the Damned: http://twitch.tv/aegisornus

Shadows of the Damned was developed by Grasshopper Manufacture and published by EA for the PS3 and Xbox360. Played through all difficulties and obtained all achievements over 25+ hours of gameplay. Review based on the Xbox360 version.