Shadow Complex

by belajjal on Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 at 13:31 - Comments: 0

Shadow Complex

At E3 this year the creator of Gears of War, Cliffy B of Epic games, showed a demo of a 2,5D Castleroid (or Metrovania if you like) clone. A few months later Shadow Complex was released on Xbox Live for 1200 MS points. The game is set in the universe of Orson Scott Cards novel Empire, which I had never even heard of before I played the game. You play as Jason Flemming who are on a date in the woods. After a game of hide and seek in a cave your date Claire gets kidnapped by unknown men in uniforms and helmets and carried in to a futuristic door in the cave. You pick up her flashlight and backpack and set out to find her. Once inside the door a large underground complex is explored bit by bit in a style that is very close to Super Metroid or Symphony of the Night.
The game is presented in full 3D but played in 2D with the exceptions of enemies in the fore- or background where you character auto aims. This brings us to my first issue with the game, the auto aim. There is no way of forcing the game to aim at someone in the background as this is handled automatically. I had several instances of enemies blasting me to pieces from the background with my character shooting straight in to a wall. The graphics are generally nice but during cut scenes the camera often zooms in and you can see that this game is on a low budget, especially Claire is really really ugly. Like the games where Shadow Complex clearly takes inspiration from you find different zones in the game. These areas usually have different music and look but in SC there are no music, period. Some ambient sounds here and there bit otherwise silent. The environments also look more or less the same everywhere, even the enemies look the same with only a few variations. Some larger bosses are present which is nice though.
The core gameplay is to collect items and there are a total of over 100 items to find. Rooms with items are marked with a question mark on the map and a dot when picked up. Key items to be able to explore new areas are found at a steady pace as well. Jump higher, run faster, new weapons that open specific doors etc. Metroid 101. The only unique aspect is the foam gun that you can use to build platforms or trap enemies but these features are really only used to get a few extra items. I finished the game in 7 hours and found 100% of the items after 2 more hours which is a really good length for a XBLA game. There are still some achievements that I didn?t get, like beating the game with less than 13% of the items, so there are some replay value still.
I love Castleroid games and I like this as well. I understand that it is a low budget downloadable game so I won?t hold any real grudges against its flaws but I can?t stop imagining how this would play if it had a bigger budget and more development time. Better atmosphere, more variation, bigger map and better graphics. I would recommend this game to any old school adventurer but if you are new to the genre I strongly recommend Super Metroid on VC or Castlevania Symphony of the Night on XBLA which are both much better games.

tags: shadow complex metroid castlevania