Shadow of the Orient

Shadow of the Orient is like a sketchy roller coaster ride. There are ups, there are downs, it will throw you for a loop and occasionally the whole thing flies so far off the rails that the entire theme park gets shut down. On second thought, this is actually worse than that, because at least the broken theme park isn’t asking you for money. I hate to cut this short, but there’s no reason to delay what I’m sure will be my very contentious review of Shadow of the Orient.

When it was pitched to me, Shadow of the Orient sounded like a can’t miss mash-up of Ninja Gaiden and Huntdown, two games that I genuinely love. It stars a heavenly warrior named Xiaolang who travels East when an evil shadow clan kidnaps the children of the Orient. Through three acts and fifteen levels, our supernatural hero will battle the warlords and rescue the innocent kids, three at a time.

As a throwback action game, this is a solid set-up. The bad guys are a little vague, but it has a strong theme and a cool hero. And with three caged children to rescue in each stage, plus all kinds of treasure hidden abound, Shadow of the Orient gives you a lot of reasons to not just replay the stages, but thoroughly explore them. The surprisingly complicated level design is one of the things that I genuinely like about this game. Another thing is the presentation, which gives us beautiful pixel graphics and stunning backgrounds. It definitely looks the part of a throwback action game, though you can tell that there are some modern effects added throughout. This game looks sharp and visually makes a good first impression.

Unfortunately, things start going downhill the moment you pick up the controller. The comparison to a roller coaster ride is apt, because Shadow of the Orient really did send me on a journey full of highs and lows. I’ll admit, I started out hating this game. It’s one of those throwback games that fundamentally misunderstands the difference between a challenging game and one filled with unavoidable cheap hits.

Let’s use Ninja Gaiden as a comparison, as I think we can all agree that it’s one of the hardest games on the Nintendo Entertainment System. Despite having a reputation for being challenging, it’s also fair, especially at the beginning. When the enemies rush at you in the first level, Ryu is able to take them out with a single swipe of his blade. That is not the case when it comes to Shadow of the Orient. Our hero starts out with nothing more than a series of short-range punches. This means that if you actually want to hit the enemy, then you’re going to need to be right next to them. That would be fine if, like Ninja Gaiden, you defeated the enemy in a single hit, but since most will take three or four hits to kill, you’re basically guaranteed to take damage with every encounter.

It's actually worse than that, because most of these early enemies will rush at you or, in the case of birds, swoop down, giving you very little time to react. Couple that with the finnicky wall jump and an over-reliance of spikes, and it feels early on like you can’t go a second without losing some life. And don’t get me wrong, the problem isn’t that some of the hits feel cheap and unavoidable, but rather that ALL of them feels cheap and unavoidable. Every single one of them.

That’s when I knew that I must be missing something. Surely, the developer doesn’t intend for me to take damage after literally every encounter. This must be my fault. And, to be fair, I am partially to blame. After going all the way back to the main menu, I discovered that you can shop and buy new weapons, abilities and upgrades for our Heavenly warrior. I saw multiple swords and a staff, but didn’t have the gems to buy those yet, so I opted instead to pick up the ability that let me damage enemies by jumping on their head. I figured that this would be a far easier way to fight the bad guys while I replayed the first few stages to earn enough money to buy an actual weapon.

I learned two important lessons doing this. For one thing, jumping on the heads of your opponents is incredibly inconsistent. There are times when it works perfectly, and other times when it doesn’t register as an attack, so instead you end up taking damage. The other thing you’ll quickly realize is that the color gems you are grabbing are only going up one at a time. Oh sure, the number that pops up from snagging a purple gem is 25, but you’re not getting 25 of that currency. You’re getting one. And since there are several different colors to pick up, each for a different type of weapon or upgrade, it’s going to take you a long time to earn even the cheapest items. What is this, a free-to-play mobile game?

After doing a lot of grinding, I did eventually earn enough to buy a weapon, which promised a longer range. While that was true, I quickly realized that it didn’t help much. Oh sure, I could hit the enemy from a greater distance, but they’re still rushing at me and take multiple hits. Unless I spent the time to grind for the most powerful sword in the entire game, I was still destined to take a bunch of cheap hits. And, believe it or not, that’s not even the worst thing about using the weapons. For whatever reason my longer-range staff simply refused to hit flying enemies. No matter how close and accurate my swing was, I just couldn’t hit those damn birds.

Now, it’s at this point where you’re probably thinking that the worst is behind us. I mean, what could possibly be worse than the cheap hits and being forced to grind for different colored gems? Let me introduce you to the frame rate, which can best be described as having a stutter. I don’t know if it is just the PlayStation 5 version of the game or if it’s more widespread, but this game has a bad tendency of grinding to a halt, giving us maybe one or two frames of animation every few seconds. It starts out with the occasional stutter, but there are times where you’ll start wondering if the game is frozen or not.

This makes exploring the surprisingly complicated levels a real pain, especially when it comes to the tougher platforming challenges. It taught me to avoid looking for hidden treasure chests or caged kids, because I just wanted to get through the stage as quickly as possible. For me, the single-digit frame rate was the final straw and I just clocked out. I just wanted the whole thing to be over. I hated playing Shadow of the Orient.

And it didn’t have to be like this. On paper, this should be the kind of game I can’t stop raving about, thanks to the pixel graphics and the extreme challenge. I love Ninja Gaiden and find its difficulty satisfying. But this new throwback is hard for all of the wrong reasons. Even before I was dealing with the atrocious frame rate stuttering problem, I found myself angry at the absurd amount of cheap hits. The whole thing left a really bad taste in my mouth, to the point where I completely stopped caring about rescuing those innocent children. Shadow of the Orient is not how you make a throwback action game. Avoid.