Why Have One Wang When You Can Have Four? (Shadow Warrior 2)
- Thread starter Claudette Savagely
- Start date
- News
Joviwan
LOAD. AIM. SHOOT.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I've got three friends now with the game. One of them literally can't play due to the game locking up and crashing, and another had to lower their video settings to minimum to avoid crashes despite running a rx480. There's definitely something screwy with the game, and the steam forums do have plenty of reports about crashing.
I'm not sure what the explanation is. Maybe everyone just likes the game that much!
I can definitely say that the net code is just terrible.
I'm not sure what the explanation is. Maybe everyone just likes the game that much!
I can definitely say that the net code is just terrible.
Claudette Savagely
Ball of flies
- Location
- (and made of) Parts Unknown
lol i turned on SLI and now it works just fine
guess it took my machine some time to learn how to accomodate THE WANG
guess it took my machine some time to learn how to accomodate THE WANG
The Wang needs some time to get ready you know?
Grey Rook
Genuine Nerd
- Location
- The Quantum Foam
As an aside, I recently learned that the ruler of the Chinese hell is named Yen-Lo-Wang. Coincidence?
Also, I think there's a bug in the system that marks inactive threads; it's saying that the thread is more than zero days old so I shouldn't post. Weird.
Also, I think there's a bug in the system that marks inactive threads; it's saying that the thread is more than zero days old so I shouldn't post. Weird.
Okay, having played 11 hours of Shadow Warrior 2, I find that it's basically Borderlands with a better movement system, which is really exactly what I wanted.
Lo Wang's ability to double jump, airdash, infinite sprint as fast as a car, and land from any height while shooting his guns with no loss of accuracy is amazing.
Lo Wang's ability to double jump, airdash, infinite sprint as fast as a car, and land from any height while shooting his guns with no loss of accuracy is amazing.
Yup. Also, the Jump, Dash, Jump combo that can throw you from one side of a courtyard to the other is incredible. I was doing a mission this morning where I was fighting demons in the city and there was a big guy who was taking a while to kill and the ability to hit him, move back and hit him again was great.
Claudette Savagely
Ball of flies
- Location
- (and made of) Parts Unknown
Disclaimer: the following is based on my having cocked around in the game at the highest difficulty level for about 24-ish hours and is largely a consideration of combat gameplay. With that out of the way...
Yeah, the ability to move like a Warframe is down-right essential. Sadly the various tiles that comprise the sets from which a level is constructed aren't always uniformly conducive to not crashing into, or getting stuck on, shit like a dumbass. I'm looking at you, anything with steps.
I've had a few bugs which have phased me through the map and/or into terrain when moving at SHADOW SPEED, but thankfully it's pretty unusual. That, and occasionally the game will chug like fuck when there's a lot of mobs on the screen; I've had a couple of 5-15 second long freezes when the hordes of the Shadow Realm have swarmed me. Also time-to-kill can be hilariously long without the right gun or gun setup, and on a very related note jewels being randomly dropped and influenced by difficulty level is kind of shit if what you have leaves you deficient in particular fire-mode changes, damage boosts, or elemental upgrades. 3 slots per weapon (especially given that some weapons automatically lose a slot due to innate affinities), plus one for amulets and one for armour, is kind of limited and limiting, but that's a doubled edged thing which I'll get into below. The prices of a lot of the weapons, especially initially, are downright silly, likewise the various jewels and amulets. Ammunition is also kind of frightful to restock on in full, so what I usually do is go to the earliest free-roam mission and dick around until I find a purple demon lantern statue and restock there, then 'port out. Bit fiddly.
Speaking of fiddly, modification is the elephant in the room, and whilst it isn't implemented flawlessly here, it does at times shine. The menus, which are at first a bit tricky, allow one to relatively change elemental affinities in the middle of a gunfight to suit the task at hand, and having to really think about how to use those 3 or 2 slots in the heat of the moment is actually pretty compelling. Conversely, build your guns with crap mods and you will have a very slow and unpleasant time of it indeed. Systems mastery is definitely rewarded here, even if attaining it isn't terribly well laid out for those who haven't encountered the like before.
Melee is also kind of shit at high difficulty unless you really spec your skills for it and get used to darting in and out of attack range like a tick on yabba, and even then it's really easy to get pinned against terrain or a precipice because confined spaces are fairly common. Additionally, it's really easy to charge at a mob with a special attack readied, and 'glance' off of them as you strike, wasting the blow and the second or two it took to charge it up. As to player death and it's frequency, well. Generally most enemies have a wide range of movement and attack options, and they use them aggressively and predictably. This means that unless and until you learn what they do, you're going to die a lot.
I don't mind this, per se. I don't mind losing cash on death, and I don't mind losing Fury, but depleting my whole Chi bar and rejuvenating every mob back to fighting fettle in an instant? Come the fuck on. Until you have regenerating health and high chi regain, a string of deaths combined with inadequate weapons and weapon mods can really stymie progress in a super un-fun way. Thankfully the game showers you with drops of all kinds, and farming enemies in previous levels to build up a warchest is actually kind of fun in this game.
Why, you ask?
Broadly, because Flying Hog got the meat and potatoes right.
The combat really delivers. The guns are, once you unlock some decent mods, amazing, and they only get better as you unlock more. A great many remain viable until later levels if modded well, and there's basically something here for a wide range of play styles, even for people who like to engage at some distance. There is, of course, an absolute smorgasbord for anyone who wants to get in close. I've found that properly built shotguns are, pound for pound, the best burst damage dealers in the game, and combined with Lo Wang's speed and accuracy, the feeling of flash-stepping around with 3 barrels of DOO-whoops wrong franchise-WANG is just fab. High-DPS-high-ROF stuff like rifles, nail guns, and machine guns, can be difficult to hit with if you're bounding around, but that may just be me. Explosives are great when they work, as are melee weapons, and the special stuff is bonkers. Flaming power fists? Laser chainsaw katanas powered by soul energy? Bows? Say no more, Larry and co. (that's your arms dealer shop guy) have got you covered.
Movement is, with the above exceptions, pretty great. You're fast, you're agile, you can't take fall damage, and you can climb and jump generally very, very smoothly, which is essential when running the fuck away from packs of dudes. Given that most of my experience has so far tended to consist of doing just that until I could find favourable terrain to help reverse the flow of a fight, Wang needs to move like greased lightning, and boy does he ever.
Aided by the generally excellent movement, melee is a high risk, high reward sort of deal, which I've largely eschewed because guns at later levels do outshine much of the cutlery that is presently available to me. That may change based on what I can find, natch. At lower levels chopping fools up is a simple but brutal affair that's hard to pull off and equally satisfying when it works. The swordplay also synergises really well with the gunplay, as one might hope, and together they produce an experience that's a lot less linear than, say DOOM 2K16; madcap, occasionally balletic, furiously quick and never less than tense when all cylinders are firing.
Basically the core of the thing is flawed in places, but the actual shoot-mans-with-shooters bit is first class and a lot of fun once you work out what goes where and what works for you.
edited: a little to make it less shit to read idk
Last edited:
The trick is that charge-shot shotguns are amazing. Basically, they become literal screen clearers.
Also, when you get high-end loot, an explosive gauss rifle or pistol is amazing.
I'm using a Deagle Brand Deagle modded with a +damage mod and 2 +explosive mods and it does like, 150 damage a shot, of which half is AoE explosive.
Claudette Savagely
Ball of flies
- Location
- (and made of) Parts Unknown
Gauss rifles are indeed the new hotness. The Springchester gauss rifle, with added critical chance and critical damage mods, along with the biggest charge mod I have, is my default anti-boss weapon. 600 damage at minimum, all the way up past 2k when the RNG smiles upon me.
Also you're preaching to the choir brother, for charged shotguns have been my go-to very nearly from the start; even the Hauer, the starting shotgun, becomes a monster when you find a good charged shot mod (good here take to mean like 110% damage boost or higher, to be clear). Also, slap on a mod which increases damage radius and damage done against Elite and Superior enemies, and boom. A weapon for all seasons.
Again, this is all contingent on being able to find, buy, or fuse good mods for one's weapons, but it does become more doable at higher difficulty levels where the game throws lots of really nice loot at you.
I shoved 2 explosive mods in the Springchester and a damage mod instead. it 'only' does 400 damage, but it does an additional 400 when the projectile explodes. Very nice and reliable against both big targets and little shits.
There is a tech bow as a lategame quest drop. Not sure about a demon bow yet, I'm 'only' about 2/3rds of the way into the game.
I suspect bows would also be good for this as well-they have high base damage so building a Ram Bow with explosions would probably be decent.
Oh yeah, just beat the game on Who Wants Wang difficulty. The final boss music is so amazing I had to link it below (there are no spoilers in the video but there might be in the related videos):
Claudette Savagely
Ball of flies
- Location
- (and made of) Parts Unknown
Oh yeah, just beat the game on Who Wants Wang difficulty. The final boss music is so amazing I had to link it below (there are no spoilers in the video but there might be in the related videos):
It makes a mediocre boss fight into something legitimately cool!
(also it sounds an awful lot like Foreigner's Head Games lol)
compare and contrast
Last edited:
I actually use the Shogun for my charged shotgun. It seems to work a bit better than the Cerberus. If Multishot was compatible with Charged Shot, this would probably be different because then I could ejaculate three barrels of fury into someone's face.
Have you tried the ETERNAL INFINITOR yet? One might think that its mod restriction makes it bad, but the fact that you can just spray and pray forever and it has pretty decent base DPS makes it surprisingly okay if you load your non-weapon slots with crit/damage buffs.
Claudette Savagely
Ball of flies
- Location
- (and made of) Parts Unknown
I do like the Shogun, and that last-round pimp-slap is pretty great, but I find the Cerberus to be more consistent.
Also yes the ETERNAL INFINITOR is pretty great and makes the Einhander look like hot garbage, and actually IME outdoes some of the ARs when you use the Heavy Metal amulet to enable dual wielding them.
Also also I have finally tried the Agent Of Chaos properly and oh dear it's marvelous. I may actually download the latest patch to grind out Insanity Tier 4 mods just so I can get it's DPS as high as possible, but even now it's a gilded sandblaster of DOOOOM.
Actually that reminds me, what explosive weapons have you had the most satisfaction with? I'm rather partial to the Destroyer of Realms myself.
I prefer the single shot demonic grenade launcher? Wyrm's Breath?
I've actually found the Shogun's better damage radius to get me bigger numbers overall. I think higher damage radius also decreases damage falloff, which is why.
Claudette Savagely
Ball of flies
- Location
- (and made of) Parts Unknown
Oh ok, I killed the Toxitor to get it and then haven't touched it since. Should probably rectify that.
That makes sense. I usually dash straight to point blank, unload only when the target is filling most of my screen, then back off. Falloff is, uh, less of a problem that way :<
It's great. A great Pro Pipe, for pros. Honestly the launchers feel a tad underwhelming for me. The enemies are way too dodgy-even the big ones can do dodge-jumps which make nailing them with a rocket hard and the falloff for the damage is pretty insane. Grenade launchers are in an okay place because their ammo is pretty common and they fire relatively quickly, rocket launchers aren't.
There's some noticeable falloff even when you're 1 or 2 meters away from a dude. I've found that the Shogun gets me about the same numbers at point-blank and better ones along the edges.
EDIT: Also the Shogun helps support the Wang Theory Of Weapon Effectiveness. That is to say, a weapon in Shadow Warrior 2 becomes increasingly effective as its resemblance to an erect phallus increases.
Compare for example the Einhander and Sidekick (not at all looking like dicks) with the Overseer (looks like a dick with a trigger) or the Duke (doesn't look like a dick) with the One Trick Pony (looks more like a dick) with the Wyrm's Breath (greatest resemblance to a dick).
Last edited:
Claudette Savagely
Ball of flies
- Location
- (and made of) Parts Unknown
no I mean like right up in there, like reach-out-and-touch
Point taken with the Shogun, may revisit it just to see if I can make it work for me. Also it looks and sounds fantastic and that always helps.
Yeah the magazine-fed grenade launchers with remote detonation get me acceptable results with smaller and/or more numerous enemies, and I don't actually use the rockets on anything that isn't a) really big and b) charging straight at me because I baited it. Thinking about it, enemy movement in this thing is pretty ridiculous, and in some cases down right annoying (looking at you, Superior Talons, Juggernauts, and Berserkers).
Edit: further evidence to support the Wang Theory of Weapon Effectiveness can be found in the form of the Arm of Orochi, even post-nerf. For those of you who don't know what that is, you're in for a treat.
Edit II: also if it counts a dick-weapon then that further cements the UST between it's owner and Wang which is great
Last edited:
I hate those fucking teleporting Mist guys. Those are the literal worst. And the Zilladrones. Almost as bad.
Like I said in my edit to the prior post, the Shogun should be more effective than the Cerberus given the Wang Theory of Weapon Effectiveness, as its single long barrel makes it more dick-like and thus more dangerous. If you could somehow make the Demonic Rod a weapon, it would probably be so overpowered the Nobitsura Kage wouldn't be able to compete.
Claudette Savagely
Ball of flies
- Location
- (and made of) Parts Unknown
Man fuck the Demonic Rod (snicker) I want to get my hands on that gargantuan gilded girthy... thing that Smith has in his library. Can you imagine??
also yes Mists can go eat shit, especially in numbers
edit: additionally whilst i'm complaining about enemies, the capacity of the Belly to endlessly summon reinforcements periodically is just horseshit
Last edited:
The Belly is at least slow af, has attacks so telegraphed he could call himself Samuel Morse, and isn't that tough given his huge bulk so you can just unload on him and he will fall over and die
Playing on Insanity 2 makes me appreciate them compared to like, the ridiculously fast Talons/Mists/etc who can take you from 140 health to critical in literally half a second