bought Shadow Complex on xbox arcade and started playing a little bit of it. i've been in the mood for a new oldschool-inspired platformer, and this game meets that categorization, even if it doesn't really do anything else. it's vaguely fun i guess, but it's rather overwhelmingly stupid. the design of the game is fairly sharp and mostly intuitive, but it's a really stupid fucking game.
i feel a little bad for them. they admittedly tried to be as much like metroid as possible, and pull it off with surprising accuracy, with one major exception: no atmosphere at all. it's weird, just ZERO ATMOSPHERE. virtually no music, bland uninteresting visuals, dull and repetitive enemies, nauseating and predictable story, no sense of mystery. it's like a fucking ROBOT analyzed metroid and took all the mundane technical elements and totally overlooked any sort of life or mood whatsoever which, as far as i'm concerned, was what really separated metroid from other games of that type. they went through the trouble of making a metroid clone, without really understanding metroid. it's actually pretty sad. it's a miracle these people have not accidentally electrocuted themselves or something.
what makes it worse is that they actually push the game as some legitimate story-telling effort, simply because they got famed homophobe orson scott card to shit out some worthless story premise and got some absolutely dreadful star trek fanfiction writer to pen the dialogue. i'm only about two or three hours into the game, but it's probably the WORST storytelling i've seen in a game in a long time. other games like oblivion get a free pass in this case because it's clear that they didn't really give a shit, but this game actually attempts to tell a story and fails miserably. they actually go out of their way to be careful with cutscene placement and distributing information through random fuckers talking, but the whole thing feels extremely forced and stilted with nauseating voice acting. like it's really clear that they had a big map of the game with a bunch of stickers that said INSERT PLOT INFORMATION HERE and the writer would come in and scribble the first cliche rubbish to come to his mind and they would all sit around the warm glow of the computers furiously masturbating to their homegrown orson scott card fanfiction.
despite this, i guess the game is fairly fun but only if you're really too lazy to pick up one of the old metroid games and just play that. i kinda wish i had considered this going in. i would have just grabbed one of the old metroid roms, played through them again, saved myself 15 bucks, and had a much more enjoyable/rewarding experience. shadow complex contributes next to nothing to platformers except this really jarring 2.5D that does nothing but make the controls less intuitive and feature thousands of random walkways that the main character instinctively knows not to go down(i guess he knows the game is not 3D?!?).
i'll finish the game because i don't completely hate it, but i will not be giving my money to game companies that name themselves CHAIR in the future. i really should have known better than to do something so foolish!
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