Shadwen gameplay1/4/2024 This makes it a bit harder to track specific enemies to try and learn their movement patterns. Regardless of where you’re traversing, you’re going to see the same enemies throughout. You’ve got night, rainy night, dark dungeon, dark city square, and there’s always a wind blowing through. There’s a lot of familiar-looking scenes throughout Shadwen. The jump one make sense, but the sword? Less so. Jump in the air? When you reach the peak of your jump, time pauses. Swing your sword? Time pauses after the swing reaches its apex. Holding the R1 button to make time pass while not moving is helpful, but I wish there was an option to make it a toggle button, rather than a hold, because the time at which the game pauses after you initiate an action feels a bit strange. Swinging from place to place feels awkward, jumps feel imprecise, trying to climb up from a ledge feels more precarious than it should be, and it all just feels messy, from top to bottom. ![]() The amount of materials needed to craft these tools are in short supply, so it makes sense to give them a trial run before ultimately committing to their use.Īgain, I’m glad time does not move when you’re not pressing any buttons for movement, because this game has a really loose and janky feel to it. There’s also specialty tools that Shadwen can use, like mines or a rolling ball mechanism that can pull enemies away as they stare in wonder at the distraction that they ultimately wind up breaking. ![]() But PhysX is a tricky beast, and things don’t always end up quite as you’d like, so there’s a lot of trial and error. There’s plenty of movable and destructible objects in the world that can be used to distract or harm your enemies. This allows for a lot of experimentation, which you’re going to be doing a lot of, thanks to the PhysX engine. But rather than make you restart, you can simply rewind time back to a safe point. This is incredibly helpful since the moment you’re spotted, it’s game over. In the event you make a mistake, you can rewind time, as far back as you’d like, to allow you to take a new approach on an objective. Time only moves when you move, or hold a button to allow time to pass, meaning even in midair you have the means to alter your path while you’re swinging from perch to perch. One of the neat features of Shadwen is how much control over time you have. You have plenty of tools to complete your objective. The biggest problem, though, is that Lily’s AI is really selective of when it wants to move, even with a button dedicated to telling Lily where to go, she still stubbornly stands in place a lot of the time. What this does is ultimately devolve the game into a flowchart of: kill enemies that are very far ahead of you, then distract enough guards for Lily to run by undetected to the end of the stage. So when you do dispatch a knight, you’ve got to make sure it’s well out of view of Lily, or you’ll have a message on screen telling you how horrified she is to see what you’ve done (you monster). The game goes out of its way to point it out to you too. The only problem is that you’re also an assassin, and having her see your handiwork in action will spoil a great deal of the story. Shadwen’s attempts at the king of Rivendon’s life is still her primary objective, but with Lily along, the rules change. ![]() Shadwen is an assassin, and at the outset you’re shown that Lily isn’t much more than a street urchin who’s lost her parents, and it’s Shadwen’s luck-good or bad?-that happens to save Lily. Among the numerous bugs, floaty and confusing controls, and the lackluster AI, Shadwen is a game that I was initially excited for, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired. ![]() Well, there’s a little more to it than that, and it ultimately sets the stage for quite a bit of disappointment. Trailers for Shadwen had this game pegged as a dastardly murder simulator, where enemy knights would fall due to the clever machinations you had set up, like some kind of sadistic Rube Goldberg machine.
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