Intro

SW2 is a first-person slasher/shooter in which you visit maps, kill stuff and get new weapons, upgrades and skills.

The Good

SW2 has a lot of things going for it. It's fun and fast-paced. Movement is mostly very smooth, with dash, double jump and no fall damage. There are tons of enemies and weapons and combat feels visceral. The humour is solid, especially some of the fortune cookies are great: "I've figured it out guys, it's to be" - Shakespeare.

The game is well-optimised and i could even sort of play it in 4K with my crappy RX560 (like 20 fps or something, i quickly went back to 1K). It looks really nice and quite a bit of the environment is destructible.

I want to especially highlight how there are bounties that you can freely ignore or play to get xp/items. Combined with being able to revisit areas with new enemies present you can never really get "stuck" due to the difficulty.

Oh yeah, and the Vanish power combined with the sword ranged attack is amazing. Loved using that one.

The Bad

The system with slotable item upgrades works good for the most part, but it does require too much attention. A "merge all junks" option would have helped a lot.

There is a limited amount of maps and you have to revisit them a tad too often. And i even skipped half a dozen bounties.

The trials are disappointing. They're really hard (harder than the normal game) and to use the special powers you unlock you have to replay them to gather enough special orbs. I never even bothered with any of it after unlocking everything. Seriously, i wanted to remove the negative effects from one upgrade item and it required like 120 orbs when completing a single trial gives only 3!

The skill system is kinda unbalanced with some skills being useless or overly expensive. The descriptions for some are kinda vague too.

Conclusion

Shadow Warrior 2 is a good game. It's fun, looks good, has no micro-transactions or daily quests or whatever, and it only takes ~30 hours even if you do almost every side-quest. If you just want to brutally murder monsters and stuff with swords, bows and miniguns - look no further.

So this is the one of the very few games I’ve fully completed in my life, in the sense that I’ve done every single main quest, side quest and activity there is to do. I’ve spent about 35hrs in a game that seemingly takes most people 24hrs to reach completionist status. Yet, this is far from being one of my favourite games. Hell, it doesn’t even break top 5 of the ones I’ve played this year so far. It had a ton of performance and optimisation issues, the procedurally generated levels are somewhat mediocre, most side missions are a carbon copy of each other, the gem crafting roulette is nonsensical at best, the number of unnecessary upgrades makes for confusing and bloated menu navigation, and the amount asset recycling is almost insulting.

So why on earth did I do every single thing there is to do in this game?

I’m not sure I have the answer at this point, but if I were to guess, I’d say it’s related to the gameplay loop. For all its issues, Shadow Warrior 2 features an addictive mission cycle that mixes the satisfaction of a looter shooter with a rewarding sense of character progression. I was very close to calling it a day about 4 hours in, but after that, something clicked in the way I saw the game, and I became almost hypnotised by its continuous appeal to do one more story mission, one more bounty quest, just to see what new gear would come out of it. And this directly ties to another standout: the visual and gameplay variety on offer when it comes to weapons - and weapons only - was very impressive. There’s an insane number of crazy guns, blades and specials for you to collect, which combined with the different upgrades (although like I said they went overboard here, why so many?) and character skills allows you to customise your build and playstyle a fair amount. The combat feels confusing initially, but it becomes pure chaotic fun as you get into it. Playing on normal difficulty comes with some balancing issues: if you go with the melee + vortex + life drain combination, there’s very little incentive to dive into any other playstyle and combat becomes too easy. However, I’m assuming the insanity levels change this quite a bit, so I’m not holding it against the game all that much. There’s also decent enemy variety which was an unexpected bonus.

The rest of the game comes down to taste. The story, the characters, the action, the voice acting, the dialogue, the humour, the visuals, everything is so corny and over the top that it’s always going to be hit and miss depending on your own personal preferences. None of this really did it for me, but it wasn’t a dealbreaker either. What kept me going was everything I mentioned above that turned it into a strangely addictive experience, one that only released its grip once I fully completed the game. Still not sure how to fully explain its hold over me considering we’re also talking about a deeply flawed game. Maybe I’m just a sucker for looter shooters and didn’t know it. But if any of its strong aspects sounds appealing to you, you may find yourself having a similar experience, in which case Shadow Warrior 2 is definitely worth a try. 7.5/10.

Coming from the previous entry, which I found surprisingly unique and tightly crafted, this sequel felt like a step sideways rather than forward. The first game had a clearer identity, focused level design, memorable boss fights, and stylized cutscenes that gave the campaign personality. The sequel, by contrast, leans heavily into looter-shooter systems and procedural structure, and in doing so it loses much of what made its predecessor stand out.

As for the combat, it is still mechanically solid, shooting feels punchy, melee weapons have weight, and there’s plenty of visual spectacle with elemental effects and gore. On paper, it’s more expansive than the first game. In practice, the constant flood of randomized loot and weapon modifiers hurts the pacing by a lot. And this is not isolated on this game, a lot of shooter titles of the time when this one was released tried to jump in the hype train that Borderlands created, and I'm a huge critic about this looter shooter implementation. The original game felt sharper and more deliberate; this one feels padded.

One of the biggest disappointments for me was the structure and presentation, the previous entry featured well-animated cutscenes that added charm and gave Lo Wang’s journey a sense of progression. As for the sequel though, much of the storytelling is delivered through static character portraits and dialogue boxes, which feels like a downgrade. The narrative itself isn’t particularly strong in either game, but the first one at least had a lot of flair, here, it feels cheap and forgettable.

Boss fights are another area where the sequel falls behind heavily, the previous game had distinct, memorable boss encounters that broke up the pacing and felt like real milestones. In Shadow Warrior 2, major encounters tend to blur together with the rest of the combat-heavy design. Few moments feel climactic, which makes the campaign less satisfying overall. And again, those looter shooter colored dopamine numbers mechanics ruin any meaningful boss encounters since all they do is change the color name of regular enemies, make their 3D model bigger, and call it a day.

The level design also suffers from repetition due to its semi-procedural approach, instead of progressing through thoughtfully structured stages, I often felt like I was moving between similar-looking combat zones with little sense of buildup or payoff. I didn’t engage with the co-op mode, so my entire experience was solo. While some might argue the chaos works better with friends, playing alone only amplified the repetition and grind-like structure. Without strong narrative presentation or standout boss encounters to carry the experience, the game struggled to maintain my interest.

Ultimately, this game is technically competent and occasionally fun in short bursts, but it feels less unique and less satisfying than its predecessor. By shifting focus toward loot systems and away from handcrafted moments, it lost much of the originality that made the reboot memorable. For me, it is only worth considering if you are a die-hard fan of the series, and also, if you have a buddy to play it entirely in coop mode, otherwise, this is unfortunately a very skippable game, of such a good franchise.

The dialogue was very well written, though, even when the story lost me. There are quite a few funny lines and Lo Wang is basically a shogun version of Deadpool, which worked well. Some of the jokes were a little eye-rolling or childish, but it had more hits than misses!

The combat is excellent, with tons of different melee weapons and guns. I found that you could salad-shred your way through most problems with just a sword, but it was nice to have the option for a cool gun as well. I do think that the amount of skills and upgrades might have been a bit much. It's not really the type of game that warrants stopping and figuring out what medallion has the best bonus. But that doesn't really detract much and by the end I didn't put much time into it.

The only major downside is that it is repetitive. You will revisit the same levels over and over and fight the same enemies or slightly different variations. It gets a bit boring even though the game is short. By the end I was running through the levels instead of stopping for each fight. I would still recommend the game. You'll finish it quickly and might not play it again, but it is definitely a good way to spend 8 hours or so.

Shadow Warrior 2 is a mess, but I just couldn't stop playing it! It's an extremely fun time, with some huge flaws that makes it difficult to stand out from its genre peers.

What made SW2 so addctive for me is the freedom of mobility! It's fast-paced, with a satisfying combat system and a nice variety of enemies and guns for you to run, loot and shoot your way through the campaign. It gives you room for improvisation and growth, killing repetition and keeping the challenge fair and entertaining. It's shooting and moving mechanics work so well that gets close to other games like Doom and Borderlands 2, in terms of enjoyment, but it's just not polished enough to stand besides them. One other thing that kept me going was the story. It's not great, but it's very funny! The writing cracked me up sometimes and characters were actually quite humorous and cool to pay attention to. My only gripe with the story is it's ending. It's abrupt and pointless.

But while I couldn't stop playing SW2, I also couldn't help but notice it's jarring defects. The entire game, while amusing, feels unpolished and underdeveloped. One of it's biggest problems is the fact that you'll simoutaneously face TOO MANY BULLET SPONGEY enemies, ALL THE TIME, CROWDING the screen and unecessarily WASTING your health, ammo, time and patience. It's a clusterfuck of a messy hostile party and it just gets worse towards the end. On top of that, the UI is downright ugly! It makes everything confusing. The looting system isn't user-friendly enough for you to understand and remember what is what. It's chaos! Upgrades can feel useless, the loot is redundant, ammo is somewhat scarce, objectives are dull, melee combat feels toothless and I've also experienced several bugs that forced me to restart the game.

I finished Shadow Warrior 2 in 10 hours and I had A LOT of fun with it, but its faults made it VERY hard for me to even think about going back to it or recommend the game. If you want mindless funny entertainement, you'll find it here, but you'll also experience plenty of set backs that might hinder your enjoyment.