Let’s begin by confronting the elephant in the room: Shadowgun War Games wants to be Overwatch. It’s clear from the presentation, with its similar font and colours, and it’s clear from its mechanics, with eerily similar heroes and shooting mechanics …
Let’s begin by confronting the elephant in the room: Shadowgun War Games wants to be Overwatch. It’s clear from the presentation, with its similar font and colours, and it’s clear from its mechanics, with eerily similar heroes and shooting mechanics making the cut.
Given that Overwatch isn’t available on mobile right now, and likely won’t be for the forseeable future, we’re willing to forgive Madfinger Games for this relatively shameless rip-off. What we can’t forgive though, is just how poor a job they’ve done at translating the experience to mobile.
If Overwatch lives and dies on its heroes, how can Madfinger deem it acceptable to launch this with only five of them? What makes matters even worse is the fact that two aren’t even available for selection until you’ve ranked up a good few times.
For the sake of perspective, Overwatch launched with a whopping 21 heroes. That’s 16 more than Shadowgun War Games. 16. We’d have settled for even half that number, because in its current iteration, this isn’t even a hero shooter. There aren’t enough heroes to form strategies.
But at least the shooting feels good, right? Sadly, that isn’t the case either, and it’s down to the virtual controls. We just couldn’t get them to feel right. We tweaked aim sensitivity and acceleration and turned on and off aim smoothing and we just couldn’t find a comfortable setting that allowed us to aim with precision.
It got so bad that we half convinced ourselves that this was just what you had to put up with on mobile and booted up Call of Duty Mobile as a comparison. No, it turns out we’ve just been completely spoiled by Call of Duty Mobile’s tight touch controls and are struggling to go back to the half-baked effort by Madfinger.
At least there’s loads of modes to play though, right? Again, no that isn’t the case. At launch there are two modes: Team Deathmatch and Capture the Flag and, again, you can’t even access the latter until you’ve ranked up a few times. Fortunately, ranking up is a swift process, but still, this is as barebones an experience as we’ve seen in some time.
Adding insult to injury is how much Madfinger expect you to fork out for the premium Battle Pass, which provides you with cosmetic emotes, skins, and more. It’s a whopping $10 right now, which is double the price of Apple Arcade. While Apple Arcade gives you over 100 quality games to play with, Shadowgun War Games gives you two game modes and five heroes. It’s unbelievable.
The reality is, Shadowgun War Games simply isn’t ready for launch. There’s nowhere near enough content on offer and the basic gameplay doesn’t even function properly. On top of that, it’s downright insulting that Madfinger thinks it’s acceptable to make you pay twice the Apple Arcade subscription fee and more than Call of Duty Mobile for its Battle Pass.
So save your money and your time. Shadowgun War Games might be worth a look in in a few months time, when it’s actually finished. For now, there are a wealth of alternate shooters to enjoy instead of this half-baked mess.
