Wrapped up the game yesterday, and while it may not be as clever as some of Suda51's previous work, there's still a very enjoyable ride to be had.

Shadows of the Damned tells the story of Garcia Hotspur, the Demon Hunter from Mexico, who sets out to save his beloved Paula from the claws of uberdemon Fleming, together with his trusty boneheaded sidekick Johnson who transforms into a handful of weapons to help you kill the demon spawn.

Right off the bat, the game shows you the opening credits, and it's obvious who are supposed to be the major stars here: Suda51, Shinji Mikami and Akira Yamaoka. Yamaoka's excellent soundtrack takes the best of his Silent Hill work (almost literally, I'm fairly sure there's a song playing during the ending that WAS used in a SH game), while adding enough of a different taste to make sure he doesn't sound like he's running on automatic.

Mikami shows his knack for fast-paced, exciting action by basically copy-pasting combat from RE4, and making it faster and more responsive. You can even *gasp* shoot while moving, and you get a handy dodge move too. Other than that, it plays exactly like RE4: you can shoot demons in body parts shooting off their limbs, bringing them down, or just knock off their heads in an instant.

Suda51 does what he does, providing a liberal dose of humor, innuendo and style, lots of tongue-in-cheek comments and many references to movies. Make no mistake: the male genitals are a cornucopia of double entendres, and this game does not rest until it's explored every single one of them. It'll either make you smile or cringe, or most likely both in an unequal measure. There are times when the humor really shines though, mostly when reading the background stories on the game's bosses, and Johnson himself is surprisingly capable as a sidekick, even if Portal 2's Wheatley did the neurotic British archetype slightly better earlier this year.

At 8 hours the game doesn't run terribly long, but it does do you the service of throwing some gameplay surprises your way. There are a couple of segments where you'll be playing the game differently, and they're interesting even if they're pretty much worn out in 3 times. There are also some puzzles along the way, most of which are of the Lock & Key (or Eye/Brain/Strawberry & Baby face) variety but there are also some light & dark based puzzles and some platform moving elements near the end of the game.

They help to put variety in the game, which is appreciated, even if it ironically reminds me of how RE4 ran twice as long without distractions like these and still ended up being a better game. The main difference, I suppose, is that SotD just takes place in very monotonous, samish environments. I mean, it's Hell, so I won't complain about darkness and lack of color, but every place you visit is pretty much identical to the next. One of the great things about RE4 was that it took you places, and each area had something cool in it, but the level design is just a bit on the lacklustre side this time. When I remembered that RE4 was released in 2005, I suddenly realized that Mikami was underperforming in respect to a 6 year old game he made himself.

And there are other tiny annoyances that show in this respect as well. I won't complain about graphics, since they are very low on the scale of importance to me (3 of my favorite games last year were Deadly Premonition, NieR and Xenoblade: a Wii game and 2 360 games accused of having PS2 level graphics), but other old-fashioned elements like non-skippable cutscenes (which gets especially annoying if they happen before parts where you are likely to die a lot, and they WILL), the fact that the game doesn't pause when you open the Dashboard/XMB, and no unlockables whatsoever (not even a New Game+) make you wonder if any thought was given to Shadows of the Damned as a GAME instead of only as an homage to Grindhouse movies and as an endless string of erection jokes.

Be that as it may, the game's moderate length, speed and variety of gameplay ensure that it never (well hardly ever) overstays its welcome, and despite its faults, it makes for a very entertaining ride while it lasts. And, as said, Yamaoka's soundtrack is once again excellent.

I should point out that some reviewers have reported terrible screen tearing on the 360 version, but my copy played as smooth as I could wish for.

So, anyone else playing the game?
What are your thoughts?

Will be renting this if it is available this week. The only thing I will say is right now about the game is that I'm not pleased Mikami has abandoned the C-Stick snap aiming in favor of slow strafing.

First impressions: Before I beat this game and post a review I should comment that hdtv lag sucks ass. Screen tearing is really pathetic as it starts off in the first level of the game, even when there are no enemies or anything around. The game is Gears of War inspired and has shifted away from RE4 tight controls.

Great write-up!  After this read, as well as watching Gametrailers' review, I'm a bit on the fence with plunking down the full $60 right away.  The short quest and lack of New Game+ sounds like it'll make for a better rental.  I'm thinking those cheeky jokes and fourth wall breaking will be right up my alley, though.

The biggest complaint I've been hearing about is that the side scrolling shooter levels can get repetitive fast.

Just started it last night, and so far I like it a lot. I stopped just after the first (mini?)boss encounter, with the bulky dude who acts a lot like the bind Wolverine guys from RE4. I actually had some trouble with him until I decided to try the other weapon mode available, and that made all the difference. (It was also where I encountered the only glitch so far on the 360, but it was an amusing one - after hitting him in the way I was supposed to he didn't merely jump slightly to the side but seemingly ice-skated all the way to the corner and got himself stuck while staying in his charge animation. It worked out because I needed a drink or two at that point). I wound up dying shortly thereafter, ambushed by a couple of stupid crowspitters. When I played RE4 I did so with motion controls, so playing with the 360 pad (which annoyingly disconnected three times as I played - gotta remember batteries) has been like relearning the game all over again. I wonder how I'll do on those other gameplay bits mentioned.

The soundtrack so far is great, and I'd probably say it's Yamaoka's best stuff since Shattered Soldier. There are points where you have industrial, opera and Latin flavor taking turns all in the same piece, and I love the effect. Johnson makes an OK sidekick even as yes, comparison to Wheatley is inevitable and works against him. But since Hotspur actually responds to him you get a different dynamic, and some very amusing exchanges. And that's what I paid for ultimately; smooth combat and provocative music are nice, but I came specifically for the Suda, and thank goodness you feel his influence throughout, even as he - surprisingly - didn't direct.

I look forward to playing more tonight, definitely.

Not for nothin', but I haven't encountered a game without Chrono in the title where NG+ did anything special, and even then it's more entertaining for me to start from scratch on the games I truly enjoy. I admit I'm probably in the minority though, seeing how many games toss it in nowadays.

One complaint I might levy at this point, is that when loadtimes come up they're surprisingly long, even as I play with the game fully installed. Bayonetta spoiled me, I guess.

Viewtiful Joe, Devil May Cry 3, and Resident Evil 4 are the best examples I can think of that made New Game+ worth having.  Elevated already-excellent games to a whole new level of fun, especially when you pit your accumulated advantage against the higher difficulty modes.

Yeah, apparently it's really bad for some people, but, like I said, I had no tearing whatsoever throughout the entire game. Could a thing like this depend on the brand of TV?

Parasite Eve, as well. Doing the Chrysler Building on hard mode was an exercise on patience and endurance to begin with; having the advantage of carrying your shit over made all the difference.

They say that setting your resolution to a lower level is supposed to help.  Folks have reported better results when knocking their settings down from 1080i/1080p to 720p.

I'm no expert, but does the 360 even support 1080p?
Because I thought it didn't.

Older 360s do not, but ones with the HDMI port will automatically upscale to 1080p if your TV supports that regardless of what resolutions individual games support.  Note that the PS3 doesn't do this and will automatically switch resolutions on a game by game basis.

Ah, so that might explain it then!
My Xbox is one of the older models (bought it in january of 2007), so maybe the old models don't suffer from screen tearing in this game.

Yea, I switched to standard tv and no more screen tears. The game keeps fluctuating from great to I hate everyone involved in making this game.

What better to be fighting an annoying boss (they're all pretty annoying) for the nth time and then somehow fall downwards through the bridge the fight is taking place into a glitchland abyss.

Footage:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3qHreYK_7E

Edit: Beat the game on Legion Hunter. Gameclock at 10 hours and 40 minutes. Review will be up on Tuesday.

Edit 2: Review will be up Wednesday night. In the meantime there are additional SOTD videos on my youtube page to look at.

I'm probably a minority here, but I start getting REALLY bored when a movie or game keeps swearing all the time, and the penis jokes seem endless...

I realize SotD is supposed to be a homage to 70s films, but nevertheless the language and juvenile humor put me off. For similar reasons I could NOT stand either of the TV shows Six Feet Under nor Deadwood. I thought both had wonderful potential, but seriously, the language was juvenile (in my opinion) and the potential was flushed down the toilet. Anyway, all said and done, the soundtrack to SotD is at least excellent...

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.

Shadows 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 called "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 having a camera stick immediately look to the sides and to aim quickly covering a 180º radius.

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.

Yeah, I had that a couple of times too, but I thought it was just me.
Interesting to hear that other people have experienced the same...

A bold statement, if ever there was one.
There's plenty of negative reviews of this game, what makes yours better than others'?

Where are the negative reviews? Besides the Edge one.

Well, there's not that many, admittedly.
The Eurogamer one is not entirely negative, I guess, but at least criticizes it:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011- … ned-review

Gameshark is definitely not nice:

http://www.gameshark.com/reviews/3838/S … Review.htm

And Gametrailers didn't much like it either:

http://www.gametrailers.com/gamereview.php?id=13828

You can find more by looking at the aggregations on MetaCritic.
It only scores between 77-80 on average, which is decent, but not great.
Very few people seem to be really smitten with it.

People are giving this game a pass because the aesthetics are good. It's like no one played Resident Evil 4. I'm gonna end up doing a comparison review soon. I'm really tired of shit being praised.

Also, I need to add that gamefaqs gets a lot of shit (even by respectable people like Alex Kierkegaard), but they have people on there that know their stuff. They have people who have offered better criticisms in 3 sentences of this game than people have in page long reviews.

update: Planning on doing 3 essays on the game. One will be released here on stc comparing this game to RE4. The other will be on gamefaqs as an in-depth analysis that will be a long discussion of my experience with the game. The last will be the final review

This is something I can agree with.

I cautiously started hanging around gamefaqs around a year ago, being aware of its negative image, and found that it is really not a bad place at all. Mods and rules are pretty strict, so there's a surprising lack of trolling, and decent discourse is very well possible. If people write incoherently it's mostly because there seems to be a relatively large group of non-native English speakers there, which is not something they can be faulted on.

Now the gameTRAILERS forums on the other hand...

edit: I am going to edit the review again. I have a good idea what to do to be 100% satisfied with it.

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.

Shadows of the Damned controls like Gears of War. You can move while shooting, 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 brutal kills were fun to watch, the addition of dodging was exciting at the time, that cool button prompt to hit enemies behind you from Godhand showed up, the weapon animations along with the monochromatic bright color look of them were lovely, the unique ability to keep your gun cocked while performing a 180º turn was great, the setting in Hell was initially creepy, and the dialogue was fresh and a joy to hear. 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 or 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 the problem of not being able to kill you. It is really embarrassing. In their inability to kill you normally the developer throws in something called the “Darkness," and 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 terrible 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 creepy settings like in a level where you briefly wade through a pool of blood and I would not have minded a break from combat.

Combat never gets hectic enough with presenting enemies en masse anyhow. Your weapons become too powerful early in the game. (After the third boss someone thought putting in a weapon with infinite explosives was a good idea). I didn’t count the total enemies onscreen but it’s not even close to the max in Resident Evil 4 (25 enemies). Since your character cannot snapturn to quickly orientate the camera and shoot enemies who are trying to surround you on your sides, you are forced to dodge away. This is rather annoying as this problem was not in RE4 thanks to actually having a camera stick to look to the sides and combine with aiming to give you an 180º radius shooting range.

Bosses kill the pace of the game. Everything about fighting them is shallow and boring. Adorned with tacky red gem weak spots, these bosses end up boring the player by having easily seen telegraphed attacks. The stages are unnecessarily large and this only aggravates the fact that you have to run to the boundaries to repeatedly replenish ammunition. Not only are they too large, they are too plain. Shouldn’t Hell have cool looking arenas to fight to the death in? Some other stuff that struck me as not making any sense was the first boss given an excellent presentation of being fearsome, but when you finally do engage him the music and sound effects turn comical. Also, why does a female grim reaper sound like an El Gigante from RE4? And why make the king of the underworld battle feel like a puzzle? What a complete disaster.

The game has a few bugs (one of which I already posted). On rare occasions in combat my gun would fire when I was only aiming. A very frustrating glitch occurs halfway into the 2nd side-scrolling level, where an invisible wall glitch kills you since the screen keeps advancing—the only challenge of the level is avoiding this glitch.

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

My Final Review:

Hope you guys enjoyed the review. It took much longer than I expected to finish.

Post-Review comments:

My review turned out the way it did (90% mechanics to 10% aesthetics) because that is what I felt was best suited this game. If the game had been an actual survival-horror game the visuals would have been talked about. All the other reviews blabbed endlessly about aesthetics, while insulting the mechanics of RE4 by acting like both games play out the same. The control scheme downgrades your character's handling back to the RE4 demo level. The only advantage to the added ability to move and shoot demonstrated in this game is the final boss pt.2. Shadows of the Damned has pleasant aesthetics that become ugly because of the way the game plays. This is a very complicated subject matter that I am saving for the RE4 vs Gears article.

The game is dark and in the beginning is survival-horror, but right after the first mini-boss everything falls apart with that (the genre). The first mini-boss has great enemy design (it even has a red jewel that doesn't look tacky). The problem with fighting bosses is that they don't f--- up Garcia when getting in his face, and rolling constantly from them looks like a third-rate game. What is the point of having these monsters attack me if they cannot do anything monstrous to my character? Getting hit by that giant spinning blade arm should Garcia cut in half. Every other enemy design is fairly mediocre. And having enemies shoot energy projectiles at me is not survival horror; it is just stupid and annoying.

Suda51 is untalented and no one would know his name if Mikami hadn't done killer7 with him. Mikami does not even need Suda51 in coming up with wacky stuff as is evident in God Hand. In administrating over boss battles Suda51 is totally incompetent. The same bullshit took place with No More Heroes final battle (on hard mode) where fighting is so prolonged and so repetitive your real battle is keeping interest in finishing the fight. When it takes f---ing 15 minutes to kill a boss in the same mundane strategy that isn't a good way in making a game harder. And if anyone thinks that I am going to play SOTD on Satanic Hell setting where boss HP is even higher they are kidding themselves.

When I wrap up 999 I'm going to get back to this one. I really enjoyed my time with it, I just got distracted by another game (which happens alllll the time with me). I can see why some might not like it, but it's almost a shoe-in for my Top Games of 2011 list.

Well my review is up on insomnia.ac. No idea what it looks like. Someone else will have to pay 20 euros to look at it. haha.

Wait what? What the f--- is that shit. They want to try to be even more elitist assholist idiotic douchebags now?

LOL, they want you to PAY for that crap now!?

Yeah, good luck with that.

Yea, I disagree with making the reviews only readable to payers. Doesn't really make sense to start limiting access of the reviews unless they are a 'timed exclusive'.

Do they offer any kind of justification for this?
There's TONS of review sites with free reviews, and some of them even offer thoughtful ones.

I don't see why ANYONE but the most ardent of Insomnia fans would plonk down money for reviews...

I have to agree with Amazingu, I find it an amazingly dangerous assumption that people will pay... in the age of the internet there's no shortage of voices out there.

Do reviewers even get small portion of that money or does it all go to the big egohoncho icycalm?

Reviewers get 10 euros if they keep their reviews confined to insomnia.

Per review or just one time payment no matter what happens?

Per review.

I figure since everyone has played through the game here that took interest in this game, I should bring up something with the above quote since I didn't include it in my review. It's a discoverable game mechanic. Granted, I discovered it right away on my first and only playthrough.

While enemies stuck with sticky explosives cannot be shot in close proximity (kills you), you can do something much better -- you can dive roll into them triggering the explosion! (Dive rolling aka jump rolling afaik does not do damage to enemies, but slightly knocks them back.) This was really cool to do and I did it a lot. However, it becomes blatantly obvious that combining a broken dodge with "broken" unlimited sticky explosive ammo makes you ridiculously overpowered (broken game squared?).

I want to see explosive dive roll attacks in future games. It just needs to be managed better.

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