What do you get when you cross a badass kung fu master from an old martial arts movie with a big macho doofus? Lo Wang!
Shadow
Warrior (Classic) is a first person shooter from developer 3D Realms
that blends the feel of an kung-fu movie with lots of silly and
juvenile humor. It has fairly straightforward game-play, comparable to
Blood (another game that runs on the same engine). You progress through
the game by exploring the levels, fighting bad guys, collecting keys
and occasionally solving a puzzle. One unique feature the game has that
wasn’t in Blood was the ability to use vehicles such as motorboats to
get around certain levels! The game also has more puzzles scattered
throughout its three official campaigns than I expected for such a
silly-natured game. Some of the puzzles were a bit too vague for my
liking, but most were satisfying to figure out. 
In-game, not much of the story is explained, but each of the games campaigns do have cut scenes that will conclude various boss fights and final levels with the game’s signature goofy humor. More of the game’s backstory is explained through the manual, or the wiki, if you don’t have access to a physical copy. Lo Wang once worked as an assassin for Zilla, a ruthless business man in Japan - until he found out that Zilla wanted to conquer the world using dark magic (I guess he draws the line at killing people outside of Japan with magic?). Lo Wang quits, and realizing he is now a potential threat, Zilla sends his forces to kill Lo Wang, so Wang in return goes to kill Zilla, along with a great big bunch of his minions. This fight with Zilla takes place over two of the game’s included campaigns (the main story and Wanton Destruction). In the third Campaign, Twin Dragon, we find out that another fellow really has it out for Lo Wang - his own twin brother! Hung Lo (Hey, I wasn’t kidding about the game’s juvenile humor!) was raised by a different family than Wang, and has an evil man named Pu Tang for a father. I’m not sure sure why Hung Lo has a different last name than both Lo and Pu, but considering that most of the character’s names are genital jokes, the writers probably didn’t expect me to take the lore as seriously as I am. :P Anyway, Hung Lo is arguably even more dangerous than Zilla, as he not only wants Wang dead but also plans to destroy the entire world! That’s not nice at all! So Lo Wang has to put a stop to this malicious little booger as well.
Lo Wang is a very talkative protagonist,
and has many lines of dialogue which are thankfully varied enough that I
didn’t find them repetitive or annoying as I played through all three
story campaigns. He has a lot of humorous taunts to make towards his
enemies and will also comment one everything from his surroundings to
his weapon selections. 
As you’ve probably noticed by the
character names, the game is full of low-brow humor - and for me
personally, that tends to be a lot of fun! But it of course won’t be for
everybody. If you find games like Boogerman or Conkers Bad Fur day off
putting, then you might be put off by this game’s humor as well. You’ll
find diarrhea filled toilets, bosses that shit themselves upon dying ,
and an old woman who stalks Lo Wang, seemingly either wanting to do some
sort of butt stuff/poop fetish activity with him.
Going into this
game, I knew it was controversial when it came out, so I did want to
touch on that in my review - knowing that racist and misogynistic gamers
would want me to “just shut up about politics” when discussing video
games, while also - unfortunately - knowing that there may also be
people who will accuse me of hating Asian people just for having played
the game (I don’t *like* drawing attention to this second group because
of the risk that it could make conservatives feel validation for their
bigoted behavior, but people who attack the folks who were already on
their own side with extreme context-ignoring reactions do sadly exist).
For me, the more noticeable point of potential controversy would be that the game contains naked or scantily clad anime ladies throughout the levels, and while they were obviously included for the titillation of an assumed straight male audience, I can at-least appreciate that interacting with them is completely optional, and many of them will actually insult or attack Lo Wang if the player decides to bother them - something that a lot of women, myself included, have probably wanted to do when guys (or gals) haven’t respected our boundaries. This is quite reminiscent of the cartoon Johnny Bravo in this way, with both Lo Wang and Johnny being the butt of the joke. As for stuff I can see being more offensive, it is a little squicky that some of the anime gals look way too young (a thing that creeps me out about a lot of modern anime nowadays). I think it’s neat Sailor Moon has a cameo in the game, but even with Lo Wang clearly being a macho meathead joke character it is a bit surprising they have him flirting with a teenage girl - at-least with Freddy Krueger preying on kids, he’s supposed to be the villain. I also do wish that in one of the hidden areas where you can find Lara Croft chained up, you would have the option of helping her get free because it’s another moment where Lo Wangs reaction made him feel more unsettling than absurd. I The game’s one female enemy is also very scantily clad, which is an unfortunately common trait in video games - women in combat situations wearing sexy outfits as if they’d somehow confused a fight to the death with going to visit a “very special friend”. If all the other characters in the game had silly outfits too, this might work better and feel less sexist.
As for the game being
charged with racism, all I could really see was that was one of the
enemies is called a “coolie" - a term I’d not previously heard of -
which turned out to be a slang term for unskilled laborers in Asian
countries that is now considered dated and offensive. I suppose some
people might also not care for the genital jokes made with all the
character names, but to me those felt more like wordplay than making fun
of Asian people. Everything else in the game felt more to me like a
silly homage to kung fu movies, so outside of the "coolie” enemy, I
didn’t really understand this part of the game’s controversy.
Personally, I can see more to criticize in the game’s portrayal of women
than in its Asian stereotypes. 
Moving onto more pleasant topics,
the game’s weapons and items are mostly varied and fun, as they should
be with any good FPS title. In addition to many weapons that he can pick
up, Lo Wang starts with his fists and his sword (a personal weapon!),
both of which are actually quite potent, at-least for common enemies
like the ninjas. You can get a variety of badass firearms to play with,
as well as oddball weapons like the very fun sticky bombs and the
Guardian heads, which came with four different modes - something you
don’t see very often for a single weapon! You can also collect various
supplies such as portable med kits to heal on the go, and a few cool
ninja items such as smoke bombs and gas traps. The cal-traps were
probably my least favorite item to use as they could just as easily
injure Lo Wang as the would an enemy, and unlike sticky bombs, required
an explosive to get rid of them if you accidentally placed them
somewhere undesirable. The best thing about cal-traps (facebook ,
amusingly, tried to auto-correct that to “Claptrap”) is probably Lo
Wang’s hilarious reaction to accidentally stepping on one - “OW! who put
that there?!”
Lastly, the visuals and level design are quite well
done. It uses the build engine, so the game hits a nice sweet spot
where the visuals for the environments are charmingly blocky and
pixelated but there’s also a lot of nice decor, plus the environments
are highly interactive - you can do fun things like flushing gross
toilets or making prank calls to people on pay phones. The level design
is very good throughout, though I did encounter a few bugs and crashes
and while playing the Classic Redux version, so be sure to save often!
One criticism I did have was that the skies in the game had a weird
visual effect where if you looked straight up there would just be a
solid color sitting on top of the sky, and if you found an area where
you could look down “into the void” you would actually see the sky
background repeating below. With all the nice details in the levels
themselves, this does hurt the atmosphere a bit. I’ve never worked with
this engine so I don’t know if it is capable of true 3D sky-boxes, but I
thought it would have been nice the sky-box perhaps moved with the
screen….or at-least transitioned into the solid color that sits above
it, like the night time city sky in some levels does. Another small
criticism with some of the level design is I recall several levels in
which I was able to see the sharply cut-off “edge” of water bodies in
ocean-themed levels, which also hurts the immersion a little. I think it
would have worked better to have bordered these with another shoreline,
to make the background scenery look more believable. I did encounter a
missing texture on the last level of Twin Dragons as well, in which a
mirror on a wall was using a placeholder texture instead of showing a
reflection. A couple of things specific to the redux version I’d also
like to mention is that the game lets you choose between the classic
pixelated textures and “smoothed” versions which gives them a sort of
filter that makes the game look more like it’s running on a Nintendo 64
(I preferred the chunky pixels, myself). The game’s pause menu and HUD
are redesigned using smoother visuals as well, and I did find it a bit
jarring (at first) to see those accompanying the pixel art graphics. I
thought it would be nice if those had options for a classic pixel mode,
as well. That said, it is still a nice update to the game, as it doesn’t
require one to fiddle with Dos-Box, or deal with old grainy color
depths/screen resolutions. If you want this version, though - it does
cost money unlike the original which you can get for free now.
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