Kamiko makes a great straight man foil this time, not taking Wang’s crap and nihilism, but the two are also similar enough to work well together towards a given goal and see eye to eye. The old running joke of flubbing his lines is done, though he could use a few more for as much game as there is here. Hoji’s exit from the sequel is surprisingly well handled, with all of Wang’s development in the first game resulting in a truly self-assured badass who can quip with the best of them. He copes with it by complaining and making one-liners, as usual. Who Kamiko actually is ends up being the crux of the story, and Wang quickly finds himself in a mess even more complicated than the previous one. He finally gets his chance to finish things with Zilla, who is how the most powerful man on Earth, but ends up in a more complicated situation as the soul of a possessed girl named Kamiko is sealed in his body while her’s is purified. He’s now going solo again and working for a new yakuza boss, traversing a world where humans and demons co-exist, but many demons are still jerks who love murder and there’s a lot of mutated wildlife due to overlap from the shadow realm. There’s been some fallout from the last game, as an apocalypse has gone on off-screen due to how Lo Wang dealt with things in his previous adventure. There is genuinely nothing quite like Shadow Warrior 2 in its particular flavor of looting and shooting…though some of its narrative choices are worth questioning. Shadow Warrior 2 outsold the reboot four times over, one of Devolver Digital’s most successful releases, and to its credit, it proved to be more than another pretender to the throne. Shadow Warrior corrected direction quickly, and it ended up being a smart move. However, during that game’s development, this game released in 2012 that made all of the money ever called Borderlands 2. They wanted to encroach on that AAA shooter space, and managed a worthy contender to do it. Shadow Warrior 2 becoming a looter shooter seems odd at first, but it starts to make sense when you remember what Devolver Digital was trying to do with the reboot. Note: Screenshots were taken on low settings, keep this in mind when judging the graphics displayed here.
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