Review: Shadow Guardian - Duck And Cover
by Staff Writer
December 20, 2010
Overview
It’s your job to find a hidden relic, the Prima Material, before a mercenary group, as you journey through “Uncharted” territory as the Shadow Guardian. You play as Jason Call in this third person adventure game from Gameloft. You will figure out puzzle like areas, climb through precarious stretches, and do some duck and cover shooting along the way.
Features
The game features seven deluxe chapters from Indonesia, to ancient Egpyt, and on to Antarctica. There are multiple weapon types to pick up along the way, and there are two difficulties. The game is controlled with a virtual joystick, and an aiming and firing button as well as a contextual action button.
The Good
Shadow Guardian gives you a deluxe action adventure game with a seven chapter story that contains large environments. There are multiple aspects to each chapter with many different rooms and areas of duck and cover shooting, climbing stints, and arranging certain items in an area to unlock the next area. The majority of the game is a shooter so if you like third person shooters there is definitely a lot of it.
The game has a great art design that just may be Gameloft’s best to date which is definitely saying something. There are many different environments all packed with detail, and coupled with a great lighting effects engine. There is a quality soundtrack too that fits the action adventure elements as well as the different location.
The Bad
The game is slow moving and tedious to say the least simply because there is no real challenge. The enemies have bad aim, and recognizable patterns of when they reload to easily blow them away. There are no real puzzle elements since there is always a guiding point of where to go next.
Climbing various columns, statues, and walls progresses at a snail pace with no way to quickly jump, and sometimes you need to push the control stick a few times in the direction you want to move for the game to pick it up. During the entire game you simply feel like you’re just going through the motions with every gaming aspect so bland. The entire game is just so straightforward so that you miss out on most of the wide levels, and there is really no exploration to do.
There are treasures scattered around the levels, which could offer extra objectives, but if you follow the main path, and then try to go back to get them your pathway is blocked off most of the time for some unknown reason. Your character tells you what to look for in each new environment so there is no thinking to figure out what to do next. On top of that it’s just text rather than voice acting, and it’s just such dry dialogue anyway.
The technical side is for the most part great, but sadly not the gameplay side which is the most important. There is a slight problem on the graphical side, and that’s the player movement which is so unrealistic, and just awkward. The environments look great for the most part, but when parts of the wall crumble as you’re climbing it looks pretty bad, and there are some objects in the environment
There is a considerable amount of content, but you just won’t care enough to continue playing the game. Every chapter plays the same, with climbing, duck and cover shooting, and following the directions for the contextual items in an environment, so really the only difference is the look. The controls aren’t the smoothest whether it’s moving the camera or player, or going in and out of cover or aiming mode which both require multiple taps from time to time.
There is also a bug that pops up where you can run into, and through walls, and pillars, and be half in and half out like the image to the left. The melee attack doesn’t work very well with sometimes it knocking out an opponent, and sometimes not working without any indication of why or why not. When firing upon enemies the game auto aims for the most part so that when you go in and out of aiming mode the target is lined up so all you’re doing is just tapping the fire button, again with the simplicity.
The Verdict
Shadow Guardian tries to offer a deluxe action adventure game, and comes up short in a number of ways. The game looks great, but there’s much more to a game than simply looking pretty. The gameplay is repetitive and dull that really lacks any kind of challenge, so you won’t even want to make it through the content which is quite considerable.
Shadow Guardian is not worth $6.99 with far too many problems to recommend.
