Shadow Warrior (PS4) Hands-On
Shadow Warrior was released on PC in September 2013 and was met with generally good reviews - our own JD Brewer gave it a score of 85 in his review; praising its fun and fast combat as well as the variety of skills and abilities at your disposal. Now that Shadow Warrior is coming out on next-gen consoles as well, we went hands-on with the PS4 version at EGX Rezzed.
Simply put, if you’ve played Shadow Warrior on PC, then you know exactly what to expect on the PS4 version. You’ll be running around slicing demons with your katana, filling them with lead from your guns or manipulating them with your mystical powers. The first thing you’ll notice, is how good the game looks and how smoothly it runs: on PS4, Shadow Warrior runs at 1080p, 60FPS at the equivalent of the ultimate graphical settings on PC. 60 FPS is essential in a game such as this one which revolves around fast and hectic combat, and it’s great to see that the developers didn’t have to sacrifice anything on the esthetics end in order to make it run so well. If you were the run the PC version maxed out next to the PS4 version, you wouldn’t notice anything different.
Of course, some changes had to be made in order to port Shadow Warrior to consoles, and this is where the consoles show their limitations when it comes to porting PC games. Shadow Warrior is an old-school FPS made for PC, therefore you can carry all the weapons at once and easily switch between them by tapping the appropriate number on the keyboard. On the PS4 version, however, you have to bring up a weapon wheel which pauses the action in order to give you the time you need to select between the game’s many weapons. I found this particularly annoying, as one of the things I enjoyed the most in Shadow Warrior was the fact that I could run and jump around whilst quickly switching between weapons to take down enemies accordingly. By pausing the action, you are forgoing the hectic nature of Shadow Warrior and therefore missing out on what is one of the most important aspects of the game.
Another issue I found with the port is the way you could use powers in combat. Again, this isn’t an issue on the PC version since you have a lot more buttons at your disposal on a keyboard, but on the Dualshock 4, it is significantly harder to pull off. Using the analog sticks to use your powers definitely feels awkward and forced, and I had a lot of trouble trying to cast my heals and spells mid-combat. I can’t say how this feels when you have more spells at your disposal, as the demo we played just had some excerpts from the first couple of chapters, but I was struggling to use just the first two or three spells, I can’t imagine it’s going to feel any better when you have two or three times the amount.
Other than that, Shadow Warrior on PS4 is exactly like its PC counter part. Porting an old-school PC shooter to consoles is no easy task, and the developers, Flying Wild Hog, did a good job in making the game look and feel like its PC counter part. Regardless, these sort of games are best played on a PC by nature, and there isn’t much you can do about that. Shadow Warrior isn’t particularly hard to run, any decent PC can play it at max or close to max settings, so if you have a decent PC at your disposal, I would still recommend the PC version. If that’s not the case, you’ll still be able to enjoy Shadow Warrior on PS4, just remember that you might run into some issues regarding the controls.