(REPOST) MadCap's Game Review's - "Shadows of the Damned"

Xbox 360 Box Art

Before I begin, let me make a vague disclaimer. The opening questions are only directed at the male portion of my readership. That being said…You know that part of your brain that finds penis jokes to be absolutely hilarious? That part of your brain that was most heavily active between the ages of thirteen and seventeen? Then after that, they progressively get less and less funny and going from minor giggles to a sarcastic “Ha ha” every time you hear them? Well, Shadows of the Damned certainly hopes you haven’t had this part of your brain deactivated, because it has penis jokes…a lot of them, starting from almost the very beginning.

For the TL; DR crowd, it’s a third-person shooter with extremely crude and (sometimes even) funny humor. Now that that’s out of the way…

In Shadows, we step into the leather-clad heels (and everything else) of Garcia Hotspur, a professional demon hunter. Garcia is madly in love with Paula, a girl with close to no personality, who is caught in the sights of a demon lord by the name of Fleming. Desiring Princess Peach Paula for his own, Fleming initiates an invasion of Garcia’s apartment. The Mexican demon hunter is assisted by Johnson (first penis joke!), a talking flaming skull that can turn into three varieties of gun as well as a torch.

However, despite fighting off Fleming’s attack, Garcia and his bone are unable to stop Fleming from capturing Paula but not unable to jump into Hell after him, thus beginning an epic adventure of bad jokes and stiff third-person perspective shooting.

And when I say stiff, I mean stiff. I get that this is the point of third-person shooting, but it’s rather irritating when I’m turning to the left or right to ever so slowly while an enemy is chewing at my side at full force. You start the game with the basic pistol and upgrade weapons through both Blue Gems which are taken from Boss monsters to gain the other two weapons and then to upgrade all three weapons.

Also through the game are Red Gems, which can be purchased from a demon merchant as well as being found through the game world in hidden places. Red Gems are more specialized in that they’ll upgrade the damage, reload time, and ammo capacity of you weapons, as well as upgrade Johnson’s charge time as a torch and your health. The method of getting health in Hell is actually interesting – alcohol. Any sort of alcohol apparently “unkills” people in Hell, according to Johnson, and Garcia can heal himself by pounding back a couple of forties, with no ill effect in the least. Though along with enemies, Garcia’s health can be taken by the darkness, a terrible force that appears at points in the game to irritate and annoy the player.

The darkness can be dispelled by using the light shot from any weapon (done on Xbox by aiming and pressing the RB button while your weapon is out) to light up goat heads on walls (that’s right, you read that correctly) or using Johnson’s torch mode to charge up special receptacles that will temporary brighten the area. While in the darkness, you constantly take damage and enemies are almost impossible to kill, so the logical course of action is to get rid of the darkness.

Not so, says Shadows of the Damned, because the darkness is occasionally needed such as when Garcia has to hit a switch with his rocket launcher that can only be hit whilst in the darkness. So the constantly taking damage whilst trying to aim at the right place to fire at a switch…not really what I would call fun. Particularly with the annoyingly slow gun movement when certain targets might be moving in the darkness, which can make them damn near impossible to shoot if they’re right above you.

Character-wise we have Garcia, a wise-cracking demon hunter who is helplessly in love with Paula and thus dives into Hell after her. He swears in Spanish when angry or scared and is determined to not let the legions of Hell have their way with his lady friend. Assisting him and always at his side (whether he likes it or not) is Johnson, Garcia’s sidearm and sidekick. He, too, is a wise cracker and a former demon thus serving as a firearm, a source of comedic relief, and a guide into Hell. I actually liked the dynamic between the two, clearly a strong friendship under their verbal sparring and cracks at one another. They both seem to be having fun during their escapade into Hell which, as foretold by Bon Scott, ain’t a bad place to be.

Sure, there’s the eternal damnation, the mutiliations, and various other unpleasant things littering the place, but other than that, Hell isn’t that bad…so long as you’re just visiting and not one of the damned souls there. In this very surreal and nightmarish (the latter part in an almost cartoonish way) place, Garcia finds doors that can be opened only by feeding the baby-faced knockers strawberries, brains, or eyeballs fresh from the wrapper, a few levels that take a cue from bullet hell shooters and make Garcia float about fighting enemies in a world that looks like a patchwork quilt, and several macabre storybooks scattered around Hell to be found and read through. Not to mention an entire level of strip clubs (in which Johnson literally phones up a boner…no, I’m not joking).


That being said, Hell is split up into five chapters with various levels to each chapter, and they are all pretty linear with not too many secrets to find and a swift progression of enemies. That being said, the game quickly becomes unforgiving in the last two parts of the final chapter or so, even on the lowest difficulty setting, almost as if whoever sketched the difficulty curve suddenly jerked their hand higher on the chart to shake something off their wrist.

A good example is the final boss fight, which was a particular pain in my ass and I’m just happy that I got through it. Between the constant use of darkness, putting Paula in danger of Garcia’s shots and, of course, the crappy camera movement whilst trying to aim, which proves to me that the almighty Lord Fleming should have his name changed to “Dick” (and that more work could have been put into making aiming Garcia move faster). I honestly don’t care if Fleming is the almighty Voldemort wannabe, I have a rocket launcher that shoots skulls! I mean skulls! That’s got to count for something!

All-in-all, it’s an okay shooter with a mechanics that could have used a little more fine tuning and a more even difficulty curve. The humor is what’s suppose to carry it and it does, at least until you’re tired of hearing dick jokes. All in all, I’d give it three stars out of five (if I just have to give it a rating). I’ve never played any games by Suda51 before, but if Shadows is any indication, I might pick another up…so long as the humor is a little less crude. Not that the game leaves an opening for a sequel…well, sort of…no, I’m not going to give you spoilers! See you all next week!

Shadows of the Damned is now available from Electronic Arts and Grasshopper Manufacture for Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.

This review is based on the Xbox 360 version.