If a game gets mediocre reviews it is highly unlikely I will try it. Hell, there's a lot of games out there that get great reviews that I still don't get around to trying for the previously explained reasons.
So when a friend suggested I give it a go because I'm a fan of Resident Evil 4 (his words not mine), the obvious 'are you crazy' discussion started. You see, said friend doesn't really 'get' survival horror, at least not in its traditional sense. He thinks they should be about fast action and not about using ammo very prudently, making every shot count, revelling in the current situation and plot twists, you know actually being scared and even jumping in terror at some points (anyone who played the first few minutes of the original Resi will remember when that dog smashed through the window in the foreground, all my friends literally jumped when they played it).
As the discussion got more heated, I realised I'd have to try the damn thing. One of my pet hates is when people say they don't like this or that when actually they haven't tried it.
So I rented Shadows of the Damned for 5 days and almost got to the half-way point.
The game starts off terribly. In fact, before I go any further I would say in terms of the tone and story of the game (both vital elements of a survival horror) Shadows of the Damned has more in common with Bayonetta than it does Resident Evil.
Firstly this ain't believable science fiction (the whole RE story revolves around a corporations bio-hazard experiments that result in zombies and other undead mutants set on planet Earth), instead Shadows is pure fantasy playing the character of a 'demon-hunter' sent in to Hell itself to rescue your girlfriend.
This situation could still have been saved despite the hackneyed plot. It could have been very scary, what scarier places are there than Hell? Many it seems, the designers deciding to go for a comedy approach (what?) full of smutty teenage innuendo.
You know the successful horror movie Scream? Well I hated that. I just don't understand the point of mixing the horror genre with comedy so you don't actually take it seriously or find it very funny.
So that's the 'Shadows is not a survival horror' bit out of the way (if it ain't scary it's not a horror, simple logic).
Your rather charmless hero also has a 'skull-on-a-stick' to keep you company with a very irritating and inappropriate English accent which acts as your weapon and also your tour guide cracking crude knob jokes when it feels like.
Taking the above into account, the designers clearly wanted to try something different (and faster) with Shadows and although it shares a similar viewpoint and controls as RE4, the differences include jogging as default instead of walking and also the ability to be able to strafe, neither adding anything to the game. In fact they contribute to the game feeling even more removed from a survival horror that would otherwise create intended anxiety from more restrictive controls. Naturally, with faster and freer movement the enemies are also faster dodging about all over the place compared to the skulking and foreboding zombies of RE. Many ideas are inherited from RE4, such as the 'u-turn' button and the famous 'What will it be Stranger?' merchant has changed in to some bizarre large but friendly freak.
One last crazy thing to mention, I played all the way through the second chapter without realising I had another more powerful weapon to switch to. You would have thought it would have been made more obvious, or perhaps change automatically to the new weapon. I thought the game was getting hard considering I had chosen the easy difficulty setting!
By the third stage, the last one I played, I actually started to like the game a bit more. I suppose I was getting used to the game's chosen tone. The separate sections to the stage (the 'acts') seemed to be becoming more varied, as well as having two additional weapons to play with. I even came across a unique set-piece (gosh!) the only one I saw which involves raising yourself up a tower on a chandelier swinging about and smashing things as you go.
I would have played it a little more if I had had enough time, but having fully enjoyed one of the best games of the last decade, the jump down into Hell with tongue-in-cheek was always going to be a come-down into mediocrity. Shadows of the Damned is a cross breed of survival horror and third-person shooting wrapped in an inappropriately smutty and light-hearted tone adding nothing significant to either genre.
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