14 DAY TRIAL // Shadow Warrior, the modern remaster of the 1997 cult shooter, has been out for a few days now on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, and it's already been subjected to the careful scrutiny of the people at Digital Foundry.
The game was originally developed by Duke Nukem 3D makers 3D Realms, and it quickly became a fan favorite due to its humorous and brutally visceral content. Developer Flying Wild Hog decided to reboot the game for PC, and its release in September 2013 was met with a lot of praise from fans and critics alike.
The game's main draw is the in-depth melee combat system, with protagonist Lo Wang mixing a variety of firearms action with some mad katana wielding skills. The game goes back to the basics of the first-person shooter genre and offers a satisfying experience, both in terms of gameplay mechanics as well as plot and story delivery.
Xbox One and PlayStation 4 ports, a rarity
In what is probably one of the few exceptions in the gaming world, Shadow Warrior was initially released on PC, and the console versions were ports of the PC version, and not the other way around.
The game is built on a unique in-house graphics engine, the same one used for the developer's previous video game, Hard Reset, but with a bunch of improvements and additions for Shadow Warrior.
As the fine folks at Digital Foundry note, the engine has been improved with dynamic lighting tech, parallax occlusion mapping and screen-space ambient occlusion, which have been translated to the console versions seamlessly, including some of the hardware-intensive reflection technology.
Developer Flying Wild Hog promised to deliver a smooth 60 frames per second experience on both the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One computer entertainment systems, a clearly ambitious objective, and it's time to see whether the studio managed to live up to the self-imposed standard.
Needless to say, the PC version is still on top when it comes to visual fidelity, image quality and effects, as well as general performance, but that also comes at the cost of some pretty beefy hardware muscle.
Flying Wild Hog did a very good porting job
Shadow Warrior has some stunning vistas, and the fast-paced, frantic combat means that the engine has to render both the stunning environments as well as the numerous demons and henchmen you are busily slicing open with your sword.
The game was demanding on PCs, with many users reporting difficulties reaching a consistent performance level, but the development team managed to pull off a very impressive port on both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, making the necessary sacrifices in order to have the game run well without diminishing the experience in any way.
Shadow Warriors runs at 1080p resolution on Sony's PlayStation 4 home console and at 900p on Microsoft's newest device, the Xbox One, but aside from that there are no big differences between the two consoles, with the game looking almost identical between them.
Granted, the PlayStation 4 does have a slight edge when it comes to texture quality, with the Xbox One's lower resolution making some surfaces look less sharp, and the game overall a little blurrier. If you would like to see what the game looks like in motion on the two consoles, hit the side-by-side comparison video below.
