Shade Wrath of Angels boasts 30 levels of
intense action, featuring environments from the modern day, Middle Ages,
Ancient Egypt and the mysterious Shadowland. The player takes on the role of a
secretive ex military mercenary, who receives a letter from his brother asking
to meet him in an old Eastern European town. Once there the player finds the
town strangely quiet until he discovers dead bodies, frighten soldiers and
scientists running away from the town. It is at this point that the player
first meets a sinister shadow being that offers him help and guidance for his
adventure. As well as his advice, the shadow figure gives the player his
servant the Demon, which the gamer can morph into at anytime and whose physical
strength and magic attacks will play an important part of the adventure.
First things first. If you already have Shade,
or are planning on purchasing it regardless of my rantings, you should go and
download the patch. While it's not a magical "this file will make this
game good" patch, it does make it better, solving some issues with the
physics and some weird graphical glitches. As it was, killing enemies would
cause them to fall through the floor into some mysterious underland or even
stretch off in ridiculous fashion before disappearing into the ground. Now
bodies, including your own quite often, will fall to the floor with some bit of
realism. Those of you that don't have an Internet connection on whatever
computer you're playing the game are out of luck. It's a pretty huge damn bug
to ship a game with.
Now that's out of the way Shade Wrath of Angels
is about fantasy. It's a fantasy that probably could have been cool, but is
just too unintelligible and horribly written to be anything but awkward and
confusing. The beginning scene shows an archeologist writing a letter to his
brother the main character telling of a discovery he's made that's incredibly
important. And, like all professionals would, he invites his hardcore badass
brother the player character down to help protect the secret, only when said
brother arrives, nothing is as it should be. Soon enough, badass brother is
confronted by a ghostly angel saying that archeologist brother is trapped and
has to be saved, which can only happen should she and her angel friends be
freed as well. Badass brother then goes on a quest to save archeologist
brother. The funny part about the whole thing is that badass brother never
seems to be surprised or upset in the slightest, even at the appearance of the
angel and subsequent transportation to a realm where he needs to use a glowing
sword to fight skeletons.
Combat is especially
disappointing. When playing a game like this, you want to have responsive
controls and feel like a hero. All I felt was like a bumbling idiot, which made
me feel normal. I don't like feeling normal in video games, I play them to feel
like a super agent and do things that I couldn't do in normal life. I'd like to
be able to circle around an enemy while locking onto them. I'd like to be able
to see some sort of contact be made with the enemy that registers and maybe
even stuns them. I'd like to feel like I can string attacks together
consistently. But when the using the same combination of keys to attack
performs three different maneuvers randomly, I can never know what I'm doing
and therefore never really time attacks to where I feel like anything but a
klutz.
ALI BABA
