It sucks feeling like your character popped one too many valium's before heading off on this grand adventure. You're supposed to be able to attack in one direction and then another, like Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time allowed, but good luck getting that to work consistently. Not only are they super aggressive and can seemingly break any combination and attack faster than you, but they'll circle around behind you and chop you down from the back. Winning a fight is pretty easy when there is only one enemy on screen, degrading to a contest of timing blocks and attacks, but when more than one enemy pops up, there's a good chance you're in a world of hurt. But when the using the same combination of keys to attack performs three different maneuvers randomly, I can never know what I'm doing and therefore never really time attacks to where I feel like anything but a klutz. I'd like to feel like I can string attacks together consistently. I'd like to be able to see some sort of contact be made with the enemy that registers and maybe even stuns them. I'd like to be able to circle around an enemy while locking onto them. I don't like feeling normal in video games, I play them to feel like a super agent and do things that I couldn't do in normal life. All I felt was like a bumbling idiot, which made me feel normal. When playing a game like this, you want to have responsive controls and feel like a hero. None of these areas are particularly done with any kind of style or grace. You search around fairly linear levels for stuff to solve fairly basic puzzle elements, jump across chasms in frustrating platforming elements, and kill things using firearms, medieval weapons, and magical powers. Shade is a game I'd categorize as an action/adventure game. Far Cry, while in a different genre and a completely different game, comes to mind. Heck there are some games with trite stories that I enjoyed quite a bit because of the gameplay. If that were the least of Shade's worries, I might have been in a more forgiving mood, but unfortunately, that's just where they begin. But when you tack on some terrible writing, hokey voice acting, a main character that's about as boring as I've seen in recent years, and a plot that characters don't really seem to react to, it's not fun. Now, by itself, the premise is a little bland, but it could have been serviceable in the right hands. The funny part about the whole thing is that badass brother never seems to be surprised or upset in the slightest, even at the appearance of the angel and subsequent transportation to a realm where he needs to use a glowing sword to fight skeletons. Badass brother then goes on a quest to save archeologist brother. Soon enough, badass brother is confronted by a ghostly angel saying that archeologist brother is trapped and has to be saved, which can only happen should she and her angel friends be freed as well. And, like all professionals would, he invites his hardcore badass brother (the player character) down to help protect the secret, only when said brother arrives, nothing is as it should be. The beginning scene shows an archeologist writing a letter to his brother (the main character) telling of a discovery he's made that's incredibly important. It's a fantasy that probably could have been cool, but is just too unintelligible and horribly written to be anything but awkward and confusing. It's a pretty huge damn bug to ship a game with. Those of you that don't have an Internet connection on whatever computer you're playing the game are out of luck. Now bodies, including your own (quite often), will fall to the floor with some bit of realism. As it was, killing enemies would cause them to fall through the floor into some mysterious underland or even stretch off in ridiculous fashion before disappearing into the ground. While it's not a magical "this file will make this game good" patch, it does make it better, solving some issues with the physics and some weird graphical glitches. If you already have Shade, or are planning on purchasing it regardless of my rantings, you should go and download the patch. Simply put, Shade is plagued with a terribly frustrating combat system, a story that, mysterious as it is, never caught my attention, a main character that you could flush down a drain and never miss, and enemies that I've seen in a billion other games used in a billion more interesting ways.įirst things first. ![]() Why anyone would want to spend a hard earned $40 on a game like this is a mystery I'll be pondering for exactly as long as it takes me to finish writing this review. This is just one of the most annoyingly frustrating and banal action/adventure games I've played in quite some time. I've been playing Shade: Wrath of Angels and I'm completely ready to be done with it.
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