From the Vault: My Lost Shadow Complex Review

No, sir. To me it was all about elaborate light occlusions.

Moving on.

Shadow Complex is a great game, one that has finally helped me put aside all the little things that have kept me from embracing other games in its narrow genre; 2D Metroids and Castlevanias.

It's been a while since the game came out, and I'm sure most of you reading this will have already played it, seen someone play it or read a review that has helped cement your views of either loving it, hating it, or somewhere in between. So I'll skip the part where I talk about what the game is about and how does it play and go straight to what I love and what I hate.

But first, about the delay in writing this down, there's but one thing to say.

I felt like I had to let some time pass between me having beat the game and writing an opinion about it; to do so right after playing, or in the middle of a run would not have been objective at all. Praise would have streamed from my mouth like glittery diarrhea as I would have still been dazed by all of it's exploratory glory.

The graphics, asides from the occasional clipping issue, are bona-fide pimpin'. No questioning that. End of discussion.

The limited 3D sequences in the game are something that I believe is worthy of praise.  Asides from a couple tired turret sequences (seriously, what the hell is up with these nowadays) they help one get immersed in the setting more effectively. -Damn!- I say as I shoot some suckers that lay outside of my X and Y axises. -This complex of shadows is truly vast! It stretches towards the horizon like some kind of Escher landscape.

These spatial shenanigans also bring an additional level of strategy to the game, as fire must be avoided and returned from additional directions.  And as great as they may be, it's cool that there aren't a whole lot of these sequences in the game because, jeez! It's hard to draw a bead on those enemies coming out of hallways in the background. It is a particular pain on the harder difficulty levels where a couple of shots is all that's required to do our hero in. Playing on an easier mode, though, and having to decide the best time for popping out of cover to shoot while enemies attack from all sides is more fun when you're not dying so freaking much.

And how come we weren't showing our friend, the foreground, some love? How about some enemies dropping dead off of a catwalk into my screen, TMNT style, or during a particularly heated gunfight, seeing the laser sight glare my screen as if pointed at me (There was a game that did that, what was it?) Man, I would have pooped  my pants and kept on playing.

The plot, meh. Some dudes want to blow junk up, and, even if I can sometimes agree with the sentiment, I agree that it is incorrect for junk to be blown up for nefarious reasons. Stop blowing junk up!

One thing above all others I fell in love with in this game:  Beautiful jingle that played when I cleared a room of enemies, how I loved you.  You never told me your terms, or what your function was. We just kind of...understood each other. I did my thing, and out you came.  You did yours, and I knew I hadn't failed. Your sweet aural caress was the only reward I sought when shooting and punching through hordes of faceless foes.  Somehow you let me know, that everything would be alright.

But seriously, little details such as this; when the game communicates something to the player without an intrusive text screen or narration, just something subtle. Hell, it helps loads with getting into and staying in the game.

The exploration parts of the gameplay deal away with the tedium that I will always think of when somebody brings up the words: Super Metroid!

There's rarely that moment of "I have this, now what do I do? Where do I go?" that other games have made me feel in the past. Finding out what to do next is not done by going everywhere you've been and seeing what works where; it's a much more straightforward affair. You kind of just "keep going"  And closed doors that you just managed to open, don't often lead to other closed doors, forcing you to go elsewhere, defeated.

While Shadow Complex offers a bit of hand holding through its line marker on the map, it is completely optional and really unnecessary.  The world is vast, but the way to navigate it is just linear enough to keep it from becoming frustrating.  Exploration is more about rewarding adventurous players rather than being a requirement for progression.  Backtracking typically takes you through somewhere you've already been to explore an alternate path, so there's both that sense of familiarity and wonder.  Upgrades and enhancements help with your mobility so returning for that one item you forgot feels less like a chore and more like a self-imposed challenge.

The base that the game is set in seems rather sterile and uniform, which makes sense, this is obviously a facility where function is of the utmost importance.  Fortunately, this isn't really a hindrance to navigation, there is enough variation in rooms to where you can say "This is the room with the bunks, just a couple more until the furnace.  This without resorting to zoning archetypes like the red part, the blue part, the fire world, the ice world.  Thematic crap need not apply, this is a top secret military complex, not a theme park.

Boss fights are one of the weak point for this one.  The couple of boss fights encountered feel more like miniboss fights in which the enemy in front of you simply requires more bullets to kill or less bullets to kill you.  Some of them give hints at requiring some planning and strategy to defeat but shooting the shit out of them repeatedly was what I decided on after nothing else really worked.

Replay value might seem low once the game has been defeated. You will know where everything is, and how to get it. But this knowledge is power. On my second playthrough, that I started "just because", I found that I was having a blast just mowing down through rooms like a fine tuned man made of hurt. The fact that your character levels up, and said leveling up carries over into the next playthrough (along with it's associated bonuses of infinite ammo and such) encourages the player to be a little bolder, to try things a little differently. Like: Maybe I can get to this area WITHOUT having the bottle opener. Also, because you wont' be dying so much, goddamn, I died like fifty times.

My verdict is: You gotta play this, dude. And then you're going to beat it, you're going to play some Metroid and be like "I can't wall jump for shit! Screw this!" and go play Shadow Complex again.

P.S. I just remembered that the game with the fancy laser-in-the-camera effect was 'Nocturne' I probably spent more time blinding myself with that thing than playing, no wonder I never beat it. [Jeez. Reading this makes me want to play Nocturne again. I bet computers nowadays are able to run it fine. Stupid game.]

[When I first did this review, I did not put a review score on it. I thought I made it pretty clear that I had enjoyed the game, and hoped that people wanting to know how good the game was would read up on what I liked and disliked, thought those things I enjoyed were things they enjoyed also and so on and so forth.  Sometimes it's weird giving a game a numerical score so I don't think I will give a numerical score to this one. Instead I will give it a rating of 24 bananas. What does that mean? It's up to you. That way, no matter what your attitude is towards the game, we can both agree: "Man! That game deserved every single one of those 24 bananas!" or, conversely, "This game sucks. No wonder it only got 24 bananas".]

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