[PS3] [360] Shadows of the Damned

[immersedreality(old)]

Goichi Suda's and Shinji Mikami's secret project has finally been revealed, a horror-themed third-person shooter with composer Akira Yamaoka of Silent Hill fame doing the score.

Official website and first trailer:

http://www.ea.com/shadows-of-the-damned

[icycalm]

The announcement trailer again, on YouTube in 720p:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wS8uISK7-hM&fmt=22

Stylistically it's far below both Killer 7 and No More Heroes (as well as, of course, anything Mikami has ever worked on...), whilst mechanically it basically looks like Biohazard 4 (i.e. extremely outdated). The setting seems bland, and the only redeeming feature I can see from that trailer is the hard rock track playing in the background, which is very unsual for a videogame and certainly fits the game's (rather bland) cowboy-demon setting.

So yeah. Huge disappointment as far as I am concerned.

Very strange that EA is publishing. And also that they are using the Unreal engine. But I guess these two facts must be somehow related. Also interesting that the game has no official Japanese site yet... the link from GHM's Japanese site sends you straight to EA's English site. All this notwithstanding the fact that the launch event for the game was held in Japan (EA Tokyo Showcase 2010):

http://www.famitsu.com/news/201009/15033560.html

[Icemael]

New screenshots have been released: http://www.eurogamer.net/gallery.php?ga ... id=1328263

[icycalm]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6izI-PidwA



Classic Japanese geamplay and old-school voice-acting. Interest has risen to 3/5.

[El Chaos]

http://www.ea.com/shadows-of-the-damned ... ourjohnson

It's slated for a June 21 release. Let's hope it turns out to be divertido.

[icycalm]

Ex-Insomnia poster vert1 wrote this review in another forum:

http://www.soundtrackcentral.com/forums ... 899#p66899

Review: 2/5

After many months of waiting a new game involving Shinji Mikami is out. Unfortunately, he is not the director. Instead of a game that could set the standard for third-person shooters we end up with a bastardized failure of one.

Shadow of the Damned controls like Gears of War; a game that desperately wants to be an FPS. You can move while shooting, you can jump roll away from enemy attacks, switch weapons & heal in real-time, and so on. Up to the first mini-boss encounter I really did think this game was going to be game of the year. The fight with this berserker enemy would proceed to show three huge flaws that would ruin the game: the dodging system, the camera, and the excessive time to kill bosses in mundane strategies repeated ad nauseam.

The dodge system goes beyond making you invulnerable for a short time to invincible. You’re not going to get punished for dodging and no enemy will be able to hit you if you repeatedly dodge because the recovery time is practically non-existent. You will never be threatened/cornered when you can roll away from any situation. A big enemy’s size no longer has any meaning as it no longer has any menacing effect on you. And you will pity these large beasts as they swing around hitting only the air looking foolish.

The enemies in the game have a tough problem killing you. It is really embarrassing. In their inability to kill you normally the developer throws in something call "the darkness". If you don't find light in these situations, you are going to die very quickly. I much preferred Metroid Prime 2: Echoes' handling of this. The game never does anything clever with the darkness and in no way do I want to hear the music that plays when you are immersed in it again. It really would have been nice instead of dumb puzzles and amusing, but bad side-scrolling events, if some real exploration could be done. Huge wasted opportunities when you have a torch your character is walking around with and Akira Yamaoka & Jun Fukuda on sound design. The game has a few really creepy settings and I would not have minded a break from combat. Combat never gets hectic enough with presenting enemies en masse. I didn’t count the total enemies onscreen but it’s not even close to the max on RE4.

Since your character cannot aim quickly to the sides or move the camera quickly to the side to shoot enemies who are trying to surround you, you are forced to dodge away. This is rather annoying as this problem was not in Resident Evil 4 thanks to actually have a camera stick immediately look to the sides and to aim quickly covering 90*.

The game has a few bugs (one of which I already posted). On rare occasions in combat my gun would fire when all that was done was aiming. A very frustrating one is halfway through the 2nd sidescrolling level an invisible wall glitch can occur which kills you since the screen keeps advancing. The soundtrack is gonna get a purchase from me. The story is well done. The graphics are fine.

This game doesn't need newgame+. It needs a drastic remake.

edit: This review is still not what I consider complete, but it is still the best thing on the internet. I will be adding to it some much more later on.

[icycalm]

Sent him this email:

How would you feel about me publishing your review? If that's okay with you, send me the finished version when it's done. And a cautionary note: do not try to rewrite the review, because it will only end up being boring and stilted, and I am not going to want it then. The style and the flow are perfect as they are and very natural, because you wrote it as a forum post. So just make whatever additions or modifications you want to the existing text, and then I'll clear up your grammar, add a few commas and periods and voila.

So let me know!

And don't ask me about rejoining the forums. You can't and that's that.

Let's see what happens.

[icycalm]

Much revised, expanded and edited version:

http://culture.vg/reviews/in-depth/shad ... 1-ps3.html

And a bonus update:

http://demongin.org/media/160/

As I mentioned in a previous footnote, I played this game through on all difficulty settings and the difficulty didn't change: the only thing that changes--literally the only thing that changes--is the amount of cash it takes to buy upgrades and how many hits it takes to damage bosses. I have never seen game design face-plant as hard as Guarini's does in Shadows.

UPDATE: I started writing this impression before this news broke (and didn't feel like revising it, because I think it stands), but Guarini has actually gone ahead and resigned. From Joystiq: "Grasshopper confirmed to us that Guarini has left Suda 51's camp-heavy dev house."

Joystiq speculates that the "depressingly" low sales number of Shadows were the primary motivator, but anyone who sits with this game for more than a few hours will be able to tell you without a moment's hesitation that the guy had no business working on it in the first place, that he clearly wasn't ready to run with the big dogs at Grasshopper and that he will most definitely not be missed.