Most 3D games from the Playstation One and N64 era are almost unplayable nowadays. That’s just a fact – you could wear ten pairs of rose-tinted glasses and still get annoyed with the dodgy cameras, shonky textures, and general jankiness …
Most 3D games from the Playstation One and N64 era are almost unplayable nowadays. That’s just a fact – you could wear ten pairs of rose-tinted glasses and still get annoyed with the dodgy cameras, shonky textures, and general jankiness you’ll encounter in titles from this era.
Shadow Man – a critically acclaimed (and also developed by Acclaim) survival horror experience when it was released back in 1999 – actually bucks that trend by approaching its genre in a way that’s still fairly interesting to this day.
You play as the titular Shadow Man, otherwise known as Mike LeRoi. The game’s plot is twisting and not always particularly interesting, but sees you enter the Deadside realm to – amongst other things – hunt down dark souls.
What’s intriguing here is how the adventure never holds your hand at any point. The game is almost intentionally unclear at times in fact, and those used to modern adventures will likely find this a massive slog. At least initially.
Shadow Man does reward patient players though. The visuals may not hold up particularly well from a technical standpoint, but they are very dark – which helps draw you into the game’s sometimes overbearingly bleak atmosphere.
We say bleak because getting lost here will happen a lot. And we mean a lot. There are points here where you won’t be able to progress in a certain area, and will have no idea why.
We would complain more about this in such a remaster, but changing the game so it’s easier to progress would actively rob it of its unique – if often maddening – structure.
There have been some changes to make the experience more palatable nowadays though of course, most crucially the controls. The dodgy tank based controls are out, and some cut content has been added in and polished.
So this is without doubt the definitive version of a game that – although it won’t be embraced by many – offers a uniquely structured survival horror adventure that you just don’t see much of nowadays. But there’s probably a reason for that.
