by: Michael Barnes

I was on board with Shadows of the Damned from its first announcement. I’m a huge fan of horror as well as of executive director Suda 51 and creative producer Shinji Mikami. Both of these extremely talented Japanese auteurs have crafted strikingly maverick and often exhilarating video games filled with experimental concepts, inspired lunacy, and riotous disregard for the sanctity of the fourth wall- often at the cost of unpolished or unrefined technical qualities and gameplay.

Typically, it’s a good trade-off in games like Killer 7 or Vanquish when these guys do something really exciting, unexpected, or utterly insane. With pre-release interviews and press suggesting that this title would be a punk rock, crypt-kicking action-horror epic the likes of which we’ve never seen, this was my most anticipated game of the year. Who wouldn’t expect great things from the minds that brought us No More Heroes and Resident Evil 4?

Unfortunately the biggest surprise Grasshopper Manufacture can muster this time out is that the game is an utterly ordinary, clumsy and dated third-person shooter wrapped up in a great-looking package of Castlevania-meets-death metal record cover production design. The ultra-cool, spooked-out supernatural vibe is marred by incessantly crude and utterly puerile attempts at unfunny locker room comedy that is completely incongruous with the horror atmosphere. For a game that goes out of its way to make an on-the-nose, embarrassingly obvious tribute to Evil Dead 2, you’d think they would have grasped that classic horror usually isn’t stuffed to bursting with dick jokes.

By the time I completed the 8-10 hour, unfalteringly linear adventure to retrieve Garcia Hotspur’s girlfriend from hell-lord Fleming’s Castle of Hassle, I was bored and frustrated, and completely let down. Although my expectations were sky-high and ultimately I didn’t want the game to be the kind of routine post-RE4 action title filled with juvenile humor that Suda 51and Mikami have delivered, the objective assessment of the game remains that this is a substandard, outdated design. Its mechanics, control, and progression fall well short when held against current genre examples such as Dead Space 2. Gameplay and mechanics feel like leftovers from the PS2 era, and I can’t say that I’m exactly nostalgic for those design idioms just yet. Although Garcia can move and shoot at the same time, unlike Leon S. Kennedy, bad aiming and poorly mapped controls give the game a clunky feel that somehow manages to feel less refined than controlling Travis Touchdown.

Combat is simple, without any sense of depth, largely due to the fact that most enemies, barring some fairly impressive bosses, are boring variations of a sort of Sleestak/zombie hybrid. By now, I don’t think anyone will be particularly moved by a bullet-time headshot, but they’ll put most of these shlubs down without complaint. The three weapons the demon-hunting Garcia uses upgrade over the course of the game at fixed points as well as along three stats as red gems are found, but none are particularly interesting to wield. There’s a rolling move and a 180 degree volte-face, stupidly mapped to the same button.

Some battles require tactical consideration due to a light/darkness paradigm, with darkened areas draining health until Garcia can shoot goathead candelabra or with enemies protected from damage by an inky, syrupy darkness until it is burned off with a charged light shot. Unfortunately, the hit detection is incredibly wonky and coupled with sloppy aiming this can make many fights needlessly frustrating.