Gameplay

Playing as Link, er, Lara, ah, Shadow Man

Now, to answer the question on everyone's minds - why haven't they fired me yet? The answer lies in incriminating photographs . . . let's just say they involve soso and a midget in a Pokemon costume. As far as Shadow Man's gameplay, well, once again (for those of you in the cheap seats), it plays like Zelda Raider 64. You get a gun, and eventually other weapons with which to attack evil ghouls. The gun has unlimited ammo, and the voodoo items you can pick up require shadow power, which you must pick up. The more dark souls you have collected (collecting them is one of the main goals of the game), the more shadow power you can hold at one time.

While you have to fight fend off monsters fairly often, it's not terribly challenging once you get the hang of it. Again, this game focuses on the strategy and puzzle solving aspect. Indeed, even attacking monsters involves strategy - if you kill them with your shadow gun, you will steal their soul, which, when collected, gives you more life energy. Conversely, if you attack them with your voodoo weapons, you'll do more damage, but if the dying blow is inflicted via voodoo, the enemy will simply perish in flames, leaving you nothing.

Collecting a dark soul

Don't get hit

It's so . . . big

One thing that must be noted about the world of Shadow Man: it's huge. Each area, of which there are at least ten or twenty, it seems, requires thorough exploration. It's important to go through each room systematically; often, then, you'll be led to another area to explore systematically, but must remember to return to the first area when you're done. This is standard for adventure games, but Shadow Man almost feels like it's taking the size of areas to explore to the point of absurdity. Also, because the levels tend to have a lot of similar features, and there's no mapping option (a-la Zelda 64), it's easy to get lost.

In fact, this leads in to one of our bigger gripes - as time wore on, the game proved to be fairly repetitive. Run through some tunnels, come to a room with ghouls, kill the ghouls, explore all the branching tunnels, which lead to more rooms with more ghouls. Sometimes you have to flip a switch, jump carefully, or pull a lever. The biggest mind-puzzles we ran into were deciphering the in-game clues you're given so that we knew how to use the items we found. A bit of a dissapointment.

Take that, zombie scum

Chainsaw-wielding maniac