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.