Shadowgrounds: Review

I’m going to try and not repeat myself to much from my original Impressions article so if you feel like you are missing something or just forgetting what I wrote previously check it out here. https://twinstickdiaries.wordpress.com/2014/01/15/shadowgrounds-impressions/

Shadowgrounds is a fun top-down shooter but looses steam quickly.  A lot of environments look similar making it easy to get lost.  The uninteresting story and characters don’t help the games play-ability either.  I previously stated that the dialogue was poorly written and voice acted, feeling like a bad B-rated movie.  Normally I tend to enjoy these campy cut scenes but the games story tends to be “go here” and “do this.”  Shadowgrounds doesn’t escape any of the cliches of science fiction stories and their is no pay off at the end of the game either.

With all that being said, Ganymede and it’s invaders tend to be varied enough to remain challenging and fun.  Collecting upgrade parts also drop from enemies just enough to upgrade all of the weapons you’d like but not quite to the point where you can upgrade everything.  The weapons are also varied enough and useful enough for players to not just roll through all of them. However, sometimes the amount of damage weapons deal feel random.  There is a particular enemy that is quite strong which I have used various types of weapons to take it down.  Sometimes it takes two grenade launcher shots or it takes five.  Shot gun shots can kill it in less than five shots and other times it’s more than seven.  Perhaps this is because it is difficult to tell is shots are hitting enemies and I am missing. That alone is a problem.

The biggest flaws of the game are the lack of boss battles and the game pad controls.  The lack of boss battles is really frustrating because enemy variation is a key component to a twin stick shooter.  Shadowgrounds only has about twelve chapters which, I believe, should each have a boss battle.  Sadly, Shadowgrounds has less than five bosses.  The game pad controls defaults to the left stick moves and the left trigger turns left and right trigger turns right.  The game has custom controls and two other control types that does not involve the right stick to aim. So, technically, this game is not a twin stick shooter when it is definitely designed to be one.  As I said before, the game allows you to customize your controls but it wasn’t allowing me to do so making me stick with the PC controls.

Shadowgrounds is a good and polished game but has too much problems with it’s story and pacing.  The games story and environments are generic and uninteresting making it hard to keep the player engaged.  The enemies are varied enough, as well as the guns, but the lack of boss battles makes level completion unrewarding. I am interested to see if Frozenbyte’s sequel makes improvements to this underwhelming shooter experience though.

Score: 7/10

 

Shadowgrounds: Impressions

Shadowgrounds is one of the first games developed by Frozenbyte released for the PC in 2005.  The game takes place in the future on Ganymede, a terra-formed moon in Jupiter’s orbit.  In this space colony, there is an alien attack that is reminiscent to Aliens and The Thing. The story is something I will be getting more into in my inevitable review, but you play as a mechanic who has unfortunately been put into the role of the hero. The game starts off with an interesting backstory and is then greeted to some of the worst voice acting I have ever heard in a video game.  The dialogue is written and acted like a bad B-rated horror flick and enemy encounter cut scenes are generic. With that being said, I love it for what it is and Shadowgrounds does add PDA’s and computers to further the lore which isn’t bad.

The UI is very clean for a game from 2005!

The game plays very well and has a decent amount of depth to its mechanics.  The game rewards you for killing enemies and its light exploration of levels.  Gaining ammo, new weapons, upgrades and health are extremely important to your survival.  Your pistol has unlimited ammo and can be upgraded which normally means that is my go to weapon to upgraded.  However, in Shadowgrounds, this is not the case because your other weapons are extremely useful for boss battles and relying on your pistol will not get you far. Games like Resident Evil 4 and Dead Space have always felt like your default weapon or pistol were the most important. This is definitely not the case in Shadowgrounds and its an excellent change of pace for myself.  My only problem with the gameplay is the location of the player on screen.  Instead of being in the center of the screen, your character is located on the very bottom portion of the screen in the middle.  This makes the twin stick effect null because you can only aim 180 degrees as opposed to the full 360.  This decision doesn’t make much sense to me considering how fast the gameplay is how unimportant range is.  Another issue I have is the button to upgrade items is ENTER which for keyboard incapable players, such as myself, means I need to kill all enemies so I can move my hand to the button furthest away from all the other buttons.  The gamepad could be a pretty good answer but still.

Overall, I am enjoying my time with this game and look forward to listening to more crappy voice acting and exploring the extremely unlikely space colony considering Ganymede surface temperatures get to be as cold as -171 degrees F.  Expect my full review next month!