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Part 5. Where do I start here? Shadow Man is a cool but very confusing game. It borrows from ideas from Zelda and Metroid-vania's and even Tomb Raider. Where progress and secrets are tied behind acquiring new abilities to explore your environment. Something I really love. The controls are fine, though I would have loved an actual reticle to manually aim. When this game originally released there was not really a second analogue stick so the auto-aim makes sense. This remaster is pretty solid. They added in a new control scheme, new textures, new content, new bosses, new difficulty, new moves for enemies and a ton of other things. That's freaking awesome. The game actually controls fairly well considering its age. I really appreciate it. To make progress in the game you need to open gates that are locked behind you gathering Dark Souls, when you have enough the next tier gate will open. Pretty simple in theory. But the souls are scattered all over the place and not in any logical place. You'll make progress in one area only to be stopped due to a lack of a power, so you need to turn back around and find more Dark Souls to open other gates so you can then makes progress. It's kinda strange in its structure and pretty unintuitive. The nice thing about the remaster is that the teddy bear fast travel gives you hints about what you can accomplish in each area. It saves you from blindly wandering around with no clue as to what the game wants from you. It really does a not so great job guiding you otherwise. The exploration is a ton of fun and like most metroidvanias once you have a bunch of powers it's super fun to go back and reach all the places you couldn't before. I enjoyed hunting down all of the Cadeaux's and Dark Soul's. You can even unlock secrets that can alter your character or the way the game looks. Pretty neat. The levels are maze like and can get you lost fairly easily since a lot of the environments are repetitive. The Asylum areas especially. Though most sections are pretty linear there are lots of little paths to wander off to and find secret stashes. The Horror is a mess though and I would not recommend playing on this difficulty. It's really poorly balanced. The game unleashes a ton of enemies upon you that are extremely aggressive and have some killer move sets. The women in the temples that shoot projectiles are insane. You'll walk into a room of 6 or 7 of them and just instantly die. Enemies love to stack up at doors and early on in the game this means certain death and even extends to the late game as well. It just doesn't seem very well thought out. You deal less damage take more damage and the enemies are heavily increased and bullet sponges that never drop health. There are a bunch of breakable objects that can have health, but in a room of 8 enemies when they can drop your health in a matter of milliseconds, 1 or 2 health pickups are not going to save you. Even you play super conservative and try and take pot shots, the enemies are going to eventually come to you and mow you down. The plus side is that once you kill an enemy until you reload the area they are dead. so if you die the enemies you've killed stay dead. So a lot of the time it's best just to run into a room and bring down as many as you can respawn and rinse and repeat. It all kinda builds into a pretty sad game cycle. The bosses are insane as well, but most are manageable and a decent challenge. The only one that felt truly unfair was Milton Pike. his fight and arena were just wildly unfair. he's fast and has the ability to rapidly shoot you with his machine gun and grenade launcher, he also will stab you for a huge chunk of health if you get too close. This Rambo-esque monster is accompanied by an attack chopper that will cut you down in seconds if you are out of cover. I found most of the fights somewhat enjoyable, but this one just felt unfair. I hate having to abuse a save system because I want to be able to beat a boss in one swoop. But thanks to the fact you have a save anywhere system I was able to save after taking the helicopter down and focus on Milton. The rest of the game was a cake walk compared to him. Hell, Jack the Ripper 2 was hilarious. His knife attack could shred you from full health down to nothing in a few seconds if he got too close as well, but he honestly wasn't too bad. This game is a ton of fun, but it's one of the few times I wish I played on a more enjoyable difficulty. Enjoy my blind playthrough.

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