Shadowgrounds Review
Shadowgrounds is Frozenbyte’s shoot-em-up that is advertised as Doom combined with Smash TV. The comparison is more or less correct, as the story and gameplay meet this criteria, but when it comes to the execution and how well this game holds up, Shadowgrounds does not necessarily meet the satisfaction these two games have.
The story in Shadowgrounds is as simple as it gets. You are a mechanic working on a colony on one of Jupiter’s moons, and the power goes out. You go on to investigate, leading you to discover that various forms of demons (or aliens maybe?) are running amok on the space colony. The story progresses in a similar fashion as your missions involve saving those who are trapped, defending military bases, and sending SOS messages. It’s more than likely that you won’t remember much of the plot as the game comes to an end.
The gameplay is what you would expect from a shoot-em up. You start off with a pistol and work your way up to larger and more varied guns as the game progresses, and you will spend most of your time backing up and firing as more hoards of demon aliens come your way. There’s quite a few nuances that come with the gameplay design though. During missions where you team up with allies, those allies are constantly getting in the way of you maneuvering through the environment. I’ve encountered many times where I died unnecessarily because my guys were blocking off where I wanted to go, leading me to get beaten up pretty quickly. Another problem is the animations on some of the enemies in this game are so stiff, I mistook them for being dead. This also, led me to die a few times. It just seems like this game kills you in several cheap ways.
The aesthetics in Shadowgrounds are pretty much bland. Most of the world you are exploring does not classify as interesting, and you’ll be running into the same grayish color palette in each level, killing off any excitement you had going into this.
The soundtrack is forgettable, consisting of a few guitar riffs every now and then. The voice acting is okay for the budget this worked with, but I believed the would have been better without it. I’m having trouble finding things to say about the sound design, except that, like most of the game, it’s pretty bland.
Shadowgrounds, with the exception of a few gameplay mechanics, does not do much anything wrong technically. The way the game comes up, however, is so uninteresting and boring. This makes it very difficult to recommend. If you can find this game cheap, and you need a really, really quick shoot-em-up fix, then give it a shot. Otherwise, you are not missing much if you give this one a pass.
