The original Shadow Warrior launched way back in 1997. It was a wildly racist and violent first person shooter from an era when games could get by on just having “tude,” and it leaned into that hard. It was also a great follow-up mechanically to the excellent Duke Nukem 3D, built on the same tech and adding tons of cool new stuff like voxel-based 3D objects and more complex environments.
Shadow Warrior got a reboot in 2013 from Polish studio Flying Wild Hog. It had a more tongue-in-cheek approach to the story, blending nods to the overt racism and raunchy humor of the original game with a strangely endearing heart that somehow won me over. The game was a solid 10+ hour shooter experience running on Flying Wild Hog’s bespoke graphics engine, first developed for the excellent Hard Reset.
That first reboot was a linear shooter in a time when open world action RPGs were all the rage, so they went big for 2016’s Shadow Warrior 2. It had a bigger story, many dozens of new weapons, randomly generated world and loot elements, and a vast number of quests to complete across a large sprawling world. It also added full online co-op. It was great, and it’s one of my personal favorite video games. You can squeeze well over 20 hours out of it on a normal playthrough, and more if you do everything.
