Shadow Complex (X360)

“awesome game”

“awesome game”

“Awesome side scroller - metroid-vania style.”

“Awesome side scroller - metroid-vania style.”

“Great game to follow the books”

“Great game to follow the books”

“Shadow Complex was pretty fun but had some major issues, the biggest one being that it's not nearly as deep, long, or involving as Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (which it drew obvious inspiration from) and it costs twice as much. My other big...”

“Shadow Complex was pretty fun but had some major issues, the biggest one being that it's not nearly as deep, long, or involving as Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (which it drew obvious inspiration from) and it costs twice as much. My other big gripe is the cheap death factor caused by being shot by off screen enemies. And I mean WAY off screen. Even as someone who plays games on the hardest (usually) difficulties I found that certain areas contained frequent and certain death which I could only navigate through luck. To make this even more annoying these areas are usually far away from any save rooms so you have to spend five minutes running back through the same rooms and hallways (or even worse - swimming!) simply to die the second you walk into the cheap death room. Other times the AI would be so dumb I could run across a room at a guy (who's facing me) and stealth-kill him. Customization is an illusion - the next weapon or armor you find is always better so you're really just upgrading, and exploration is sometimes quite frustrating, and ultimately unrewarding (do I really need infinite foam or gold guns?). The writing was also pretty disappointing, especially considering is was based on a novel by Orson Scott Card. Be aware the Shadow Complex was not written by Orson Scott Card. Finally, I don't understand why game developers continue making games with a limited amount of save files (only ONE in this case), especially in games like this where your experience is carried over through playthroughs. If I want to start over at level 1 I have to delete my save file (from the dashboard).

Those things said it was still a pretty fun game. Enemies die in lots of different ways (kicking a robot into a group of soldiers and watching it explode and kill them all is great fun), and a decent variety of secondary weaponry helps to mix up the combat. Environmental and stealth kills add to the fun as well. And a few unintentionally funny moments made the poor writing easier to deal with (I guess that's not really a compliment, but whatever).”