Shadows: Awakening

I’ve just finished the game, and while I can’t say I didn’t enjoy it, there’s something that leaves me unsettled—namely, the pacing. The game offers a decent amount of content, yet it lacks the open-world experience that it's often advertised as having. Players need to be prepared for significant limitations when it comes to available areas. What frustrated me the most was the frequent use of artificial time extenders, such as needing to find a lever on the opposite side of the map just to open a door. If the developers were confident that exploration was fun and rewarding, they wouldn’t force players to backtrack just to experience repetitive elements and waste time. Unfortunately, this makes exploration feel tiresome rather than engaging.

The puzzles are abundant, with some being genuinely interesting, but it doesn’t take long before they start to feel repetitive and lose their appeal. The character-switching mechanic, where we only see one character at a time during gameplay, is intriguing. However, even if we have, say, eight characters to choose from, we won't utilize them much because they lack meaningful dialogue or compelling backstories. This same issue extends to the three characters available at the start of the game. While we do learn more about them as the game progresses, it feels forced and isn’t particularly engaging.

Although the number of characters is decent, the lack of interaction between them—aside from simple in-game dialogue—provides no real satisfaction from having these characters (or their souls). I also found myself missing any kind of romantic subplot or flirtation—something that could have added depth to the experience.

The combat is solid but won’t appeal to everyone, but I personally enjoyed it. The graphics, however, have aged, and it’s noticeable. There aren’t enough unique mechanics to keep things fresh, which, as I mentioned earlier, leads to boredom after a while. The same goes for the towns in the game. While there are a few people around, they don’t feel like a living, breathing part of the world, as you can’t interact with them—they’re just there, standing still.

The game also has a few bugs that are hard to ignore, but I won’t go into detail about those here. Overall, the experience feels underwhelming. Still, I’m giving the game a positive rating because it’s been a while since I’ve played an RPG, and this title rekindled my interest in the genre. My final score is 6/10.

This was a hard game to recommend, it is one of those games that has a lot of great ideas by never fully executes all those ideas in a way that satisfies the player. For that reason I give it a 7/10, however if they actually had spent more time expanding on all the new elements here, the game would easily be an 8-9/10.
The story and lore and environments in this game are wonderful, the graphics are great and well optimized, this will run on most any computer. Every city you encounter is very unique and has its own living breathing story to it. This is where my first gripe starts to come in. Despite all of the work placed in the detailed cities and lore, the game constantly will throw you in "filler" environments that that have an illusion of being open world but are very linear and boring in nature. This is a hard gripe to explain without spoiling much of the stories in the game but I will use the first city you encounter as an example. The game starts in this beautiful desert merchant city called Thole, the city is bustling with merchant activities and quests. It introduces you to a lot of the surrounding lore in the game and grabs the players attention immediately. You quickly learn that Thole is under siege by nomadic slavers who wish to conquer the city for their own gains and this leads to many elaborate decisions for the player. You have to figure out how to escape the city, talk with the city leaders, negotiate with the leader of nomadic slavers so you can get through their siege camp. All of this occurs in the first couple of hours of the game and it hooks you, it makes you wonder how the rest of the game will play out. Well right after leaving the city, the game throws you into a generic desert environment with almost no quests and limited enemy variety, its boring and you will be stuck playing through that environment for about 2-3 hours. This is always the problem with Shadows: awakening and the storytelling environments, you go to this interesting city with detailed lore for about 30 mins to an hour and then you have to play through generic environmental slog for like 3-4 hours right after. I didn't realize the game had so much "filler" content till about halfway through the game, but after awhile you start wishing the game built more on the foundation it created by its detailed cities and well thought out lore.
The second thing Shadows does really well, but falls short on is the unique game play elements. You play as a demon who can quick switch through 3 different "puppets" in real time, it is the games way of balancing real time action with a party of 3 characters that you can control simultaneously. There are 14 different playable characters(more with the DLC) that you unlock throughout the game and this allows for a ton of replay ability because you can't unlock all the players in just one play through. There are 3 "classes" but I'm honestly not sure why the characters are separated in classes because each character is very unique to the point where there is little overlap. For example there is a hunter class(this is like a rogue class) and there is a generic character with a bow and arrow, but there is also a character in the same class that is a flying human sized wasp that shoots stingers and plays way differently than just the generic ranger like guy. They all have unique abilities that really encourages the player to explore and play through all of the characters.
This all sounds really wonderful, so why do I have a problem? My problem lies in the fact the game only lets you have 3 puppets at once, one of which is the main character you are stuck with the entire game. so you only get to choose 2 others to play as and often times you will be playing through a side puppets quest for 5-6 hours at a time which means you will be stuck with that puppet as well. So the game really only lets the player "choose" one puppet to play with, while you find yourself getting bored with the puppets the game forces you to play with. This is a pretty short game, only about 20 hrs to beat the main storyline and most of the side quests. So out of 14 puppets and being stuck with two, you only get about an hour or two with all the other characters in the game. This makes you feel like you aren't really playing through all the game has to offer. Sure this encourages replay ability, but would it have killed the developers to allow you to quick switch through 4 total playable characters instead of 3? Why lock the main character and side characters in play during most segments of the game? One would think unlocking the players might break the immersion, but the characters all talk to each other throughout the game anyways whether they are in play or not. So why does it matter that I am FORCED to use certain characters in combat segments when the game allows characters not in play to interact in story sections anyways.
Not to mention the different classes are wildly imbalanced. The hunter class is straight garbage, half of the enemies in this game have pierce resistance, which is the only damage type hunters have. Switching to a hunter is like throwing un-sharpened pencils at the enemies, its totally useless. The mages have the same amount of health but their spells do immensely more damage and have tons of options for different damage types so you never have the problem of facing enemies with resistance to what you use. The warrior class has double the health of the other two classes and can be pretty high damage as well, but you have to get up close and personal to your enemies with these characters which makes switching to a warrior a fun change of pace. I found myself switching between a warrior and mage most of the game and just ignoring the hunter class. Not because I wanted to but because the hunter class was simply boring and unplayable, I started off with one from each class but had to remove the hunter halfway through the game because half of the enemies and bosses took no damage from the hunter class due to pierce resistance.
Overall, I am walking away from this game with a major love/hate relationship. I loved the detailed story telling, lore, cities and characters. I also loved the new game play elements Shadows has to offer. My hatred settled in whenever those things I loved became overshadowed by the boring uninspired environments, strange game play restrictions and the weirdly weak hunter class making 5 of the characters feel unplayable for most of the game. As I said at the start, because of these issues, Shadows is a 7/10 game that could have easily been an 8-9/10 game for me if the developers had just spent a little more time refining the game.

A good ARPG with some nice game play mechanisms, a good amount of content and a decent story.
Definitely worth it.

This is one of those B-list games you breeze through, then forget you've played. However, it's an okay one as far as B-list games go.
There are three possible characters for you to choose at the start, each with their own game-spanning quest, so it features replayability of sorts. You can also play as a good guy or as a bastard, and there are several choices throughout the storyline that produce different consequences depending on your decisions. It's not really deep, meaningful change, but it's there.
What is cool about this one is that you control 4 characters at once, and switch them in and out on the fly. They all have their own attacks, skills, and buffs, so there's a lot of combos you can pull off. Most of them are also kind of interesting, the ones included in the story at least.
Shadows: Awakening is also one of those games where you can play your own music in the background and just dilly-dally around as it doesn't require too much brainpower (despite controlling 4 characters).

I'm not sure why, but this game feels a bit like Aarklash: Legacy as world does not seem like typical fantasy, even if not to same degree as Aarklash. Though just as there - it needs a lot, lot more exposition, cause you only see a glimpse of mystery even after checking all lore books and stuff.
Gameplay at its core is quite normal isometric action rpg with a twist as you have to juggle heroes you play as. Your team consists of 4 heroes at same time with each of them having only 4 abilities, so you'd be switching in the middle of combat between them to maximise your options or try to get some combos going. Few of them even have exploration application - going to shadow realm that reveal new ways or puzzle hints, smashing through some walls and doors, etc. It'd not be possible to check all squad members in one playthrough, as at most you could get 10 of them unlocked I think, so to see every single one - you'd have to start adventure tree times. So as mentioned other than team of heroes and switching it'd be quite standard stuff or even a bit less than that cause a bunch on things is either absent or simplified - you'd see what I mean, it's frankly too much to name them all here.
Graphics and audio are serviceable, nothing to write home about, they are just doing their job without being outstandingly bad or good.
As mentioned - world feels unusual and mysterious and main storyline kinda follows the suit. Side quests however are almost all very typical. Actually game does not seem that long and neither are there many side quests with no other activities in sight which coupled with possible feeling of combat becoming stale midway through the story might result in a bit of "ugh, lets get this over with finally". What could make you push through are several possible endings, with some normal, boring and one quite pleasantly surprising.

Poisitiv:
The idea of a demon taking over other souls and to bring them back to life like that is awesome.
the Characters/Companions have funny conversations and it is a joy to walk around with all of them, every companion has that one ability/spell, that makes him unique and strong in either defense or pure offense.
The Game is easy to understand such as the combats
The Talent Tree is all right and gives some extra boost
Negativ: I hate puzzles in any Games, a few here are easy to understand, the others, I had to watch a video of another Gamer to get a few puzzles done
The Story feels rather short, I would have hoped of some more conversation and Story about the Demon that gets Summoned itself.
What is he exactly? Where was the Demon before he get summoned? Why are there just a few Characters react to the Demon and others don't seem to be interested or surprised at all?
End Word:
While I was amused by the Companions and they are though good written and have nice Personalities, their impact on this World was excpected to be bigger, but sadly it felt rather that these Companion are either 100% welcomed without hesistation or 100% denied without even thinking about for a second.
I'd wish if there is another Shadow Awakening, a little more depths in the Story, and Companions such as more depths about the Demon.
I hope there will be somewhen in the near future another Story with all the fellowchios from here in more intense way.
I realy want to be recognised as a Demon walking around with his pupets. If the Puppets were big in a manner of speaking before they unalived, I want the mysterious and mythic behind it bigger and the suprising part by their allies even more intense.
All in all it is rather a shorter but funny Game to Play.

Uff, that was nice run. Really enjoyed, very nice driven story it's like diablo just much better.
Nice hidden gem and very surprisely good quality game!
Beautiful rpg that i'm happy didn't skip.