More fun than I expected
I got Shadowgrounds with the Humble Frozenbyte Bundle as one of the games I wasn’t really interested in. I recently reached the ending after 14 hours logged through Steam. I found I had more drive to play this game than I expected to, but one specific issue made it more difficult to actually do that: the saving. Despite this game not even being available for consoles, its only save option is autosaving at the end of each level. And the levels aren’t short enough for that to be enough. There are 11 levels, and with my time coming in at 14 hours that means I averaged over an hour per level. Even after I knew this though I did a few times decide to play Shadowgrounds without knowing I had an adequate amount of time to spend on it, so I’d get partway through and have to quit, losing all my progress. I typically did better the second time through, but still I would rather not lose progress.
There are multiple characters that you come across during the game, including one who is with you in some capacity most of the game. None of them have much depth and seem to serve mostly to help explain what’s going on, provide an easy way through certain obstacles, and to make you feel less alone. They do sometimes get in the way alerting enemies before you’d like and sometimes standing in doorways blocking your retreat. At least they’re invincible so you don’t have to worry about protecting them as well. The voice acting of these characters as well as your character isn’t very good and neither is the dialog, but it’s not really the type of game that needs a lot of story.
I don’t know that I’d ever played a top-down shooter before (maybe the original Grand Theft Auto counts), but I often found that I wanted to be able to see further away. I mostly envisioned tilting the camera angle down somewhat, but the ability to zoom out probably would have covered it. I found the mouse to rotate the view and the keyboard to control movement easy to get used to.
The weapon upgrade system gave it a bit of an RPG feel since some enemies drop generic upgrade parts you can use to enhance your favorite weapons. I learned quickly that it was difficult to find enough ammunition to mostly use the same gun, but the pistol has unlimited ammunition for some reason. Because of that, I fully upgraded my pistol and used it for most of the fighting. It’s my own fault I didn’t use the other weapons much, but I think if the pistol had limited ammunition or even if there had been more available for the other weapons I would have experienced more variety.
The music and graphics were both very well done. Multiple times with my flashlight on I noticed the shadows cast by the enemies in its path; especially effective when a spiderlike creature scurries past. Sometimes when the game went to switch music tracks it would seem to get stuck for half a second while it loaded the new music, and the humans and other creatures in the more zoomed in cutscenes weren’t all that detailed, but still for the most part sights and sounds were great!
The gameplay was a little repetitive but about normal for a shooter. Maybe slightly more repetitive since I used the pistol most of the time. Also there wasn’t a great deal of variety in the enemies. Still I never reached a point where I was bored with it and just wanted to reach the end. I enjoyed playing Shadowgrounds, but I can’t recommend paying full price (currently $10 on Steam) for it. If you see it on a sale for 50% off or better, or in a bundle with Trine (a game much more my style from the same developer) I’d recommend picking it up . . . unless like me you already have a backlog of games you’ve bought but have yet to play.
