![]() As you gain more powers and tools, you gain the ability to mix up your gunplay with subweapons and special moves. Your foes can fire at you from anywhere on-screen, including off in the distance on faraway portions of buildings, and this adds a sense of scale to the combat - something that typically feels far more mundane in games of this type. Your weapons have an auto-aim function that allows you to draw a bead on bad guys in the distance, and the big shoot-outs here feel much larger than would be possible in a strictly 2D game. So while Protagonist Jason lives in the second dimension, he can shoot in the third. Enemies and other interactive elements, on the other hand, can break the plane and wander along pathways in the background. Now, you can't stray outside the active 2D plane, even when it would make sense to do so (as when spiraling staircases appear - you have to navigate them by jumping from landing to landing rather than by simply climbing the stairs, as you can't interact with the portions that exist in the background). Shadow Complex puts its Unreal Engine graphics to work by presenting players with direct character controls restricted to a two-dimensional plane, as with any classic 16-bit side-scroller, while introducing some limited z-axis interaction into the environments. The elevator pitch for Shadow Complex would probably consist of something like, "Imagine Super Metroid but as an American political thriller that takes heavy gameplay cues from Gears of War." That's a pretty outlandish combination, but it works. Revisiting it with more than half a decade of perspective under my belt has given me new appreciation for what chair created here. While I'm not particularly impressed with the conversion, the underlying game is quite good - better than I gave it credit for at the time of its original release, honestly. I suspect I'm coming off a lot more critical than Shadow Complex Remaster properly deserves, though. ![]() Honestly, I don't feel Shadow Complex's controls and design are precise or refined enough to lend themselves to the challenges offered here, but your mileage may vary. The one entirely new addition this release offers over the original is a new trial mode, which seems heavily geared toward the type of player who pursues speed runs. especially since you can already play the original game on Xbox One through its backward-compatibility feature. I don't recall if these issues were present in the original Shadow Complex, but they seem more egregious in this version. Enemies have a weird habit of suddenly disappearing for a split-second only to reappear in a new position, and the screen skips quite frequently while scrolling. The game also stutters and jerks around a lot more than I'd expect from an Xbox One title. Likewise, the murkiness of aiming in three dimensions in what ultimately amounts to a 2D game continues to be as functionally awkward as it is conceptually clever. Certain actions feel every bit as clumsy as they did the first time around, such as dropping off ladders, which never seems to work the same way twice. That's all just aesthetics, though more disappointing is the residual clunkiness of the control scheme. The game still looks tragically last-gen in close-up scenes, such as those obligatory melee kill quick-cuts and the handful of story sequences sprinkled throughout the adventure. It adds some bloom lighting and a few other current-gen visual effects, but doesn't do anything to smooth over the rough patches. Is this seven-year-old action game worth playing, when there have been so, so many games to follow in the years since that have hit the exact same beats Chair did?Īs remasters go, Shadow Complex's is fairly no-frills. If the remaster does well enough, maybe it could open the door to a sequel, right? Maybe, maybe not for now, the more important question is whether or not Shadow Complex Remastered even merits to do well at all. Shadow Complex Remastered isn't a sequel or even a remake - so far as I've been able to tell, the only change to the campaign mode at all involves the visuals - but with this sort of reissue there's always the subtext of future hope. ![]() Still, all hope hasn't been lost, as Chair has finally circled back around to the series. People have been asking for a sequel to 2009's Xbox 360 metroidvania adventure Shadow Complex for years, only to be met by regretful denials and a hard-to-deny reality: Developer Chair made an awful lot more money from its breakout iOS hit Infinity Blade series than any Shadow Complex sequel could hope to bring in. Some content, such as this article, has been migrated to VG247 for posterity after USgamer's closure - but it has not been edited or further vetted by the VG247 team. This article first appeared on USgamer, a partner publication of VG247. ![]()
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