Shade: Wrath of Angels review

In the hierarchy of evil sounding names ‘Shade’ must be somewhere near the bottom. It’s a bit like ‘shadow’ but not quite as dark, more suggestive of standing under a canopy on a hot summer’s day, or hanging around in Ikea’s lighting department, than an ominous eternal darkness.

In many ways the muted nature of the name fits the muted nature of the game. Shade: Wrath of Angels embraces three different gaming styles: platform adventuring, third person combat and survival horror exploration. None are implemented with any real conviction though. Like some kind of diabolical gaming surgeon we’ll dissect and examine each of these component parts to see where the rot set in.

Platform Shoes

Your entry point for Shade is a tutorial level, rather aptly presented in the form of a nightmare. Okay that’s little harsh, but Shade’s control system isn’t in danger of being labelled silky smooth. Mouse and keyboard movement, for example, seem like awkward bedfellows. For some bizarre reason the mouse only turns the player if you are moving forward, making actions like circle strafing or lining up jumps very tricky. Despite the use of motion captured animation some moves still feel unnatural, such as a sprinting jump that practically launches you across the level. The environments you have to negotiate are poorly designed and blocky; less wrath of angels and more wrath of angles.

Put simply, Shade’s platforming sections are dated and clumsy compared to the imagination, versatility and scope that superior platformers like Prince of Persia offer. Nor does it share that title’s flair for experimentation. Taking a risk in Shade usually results in death and a long trek back from one of the poorly rationed save spots. A fun gothic playground this is not.

Immortal Combat

When it comes to combat, Shade is derivative of the Jedi Knight games. The glowing sword your character wields rather gives the game away - talk about wearing your influences on your sleeve.

Naturally Shade doesn’t have an iota of Star Wars’ coolness, and the melee combat is no way near as satisfying as the Jedi games. Fighting is turned into a war of attrition as you hold the block button down and take the occasional swing or two at an opponent. The ability to pick up loads of weapons, from planks to pole axes, has precisely no use whatsoever. If there was any more intricacy to the fighting system we couldn’t work it out.

Enemies display just enough intelligence to make them an irritant, mainly because of the way they back away as you try and counter attack them. It’s not clever or challenging, it’s just frustrating and annoying. There are about 5 million of them to fight, so we want to get through them as quickly as possible, thank you very much.

You can also shoot enemies with your handgun, but it has limited ammo and you can’t move and shoot, which is just silly. More firepower would have made the hand-to-hand combat less monotonous.

The Horror. The Horror.

Finally we get to Shade’s strongest asset, which to be perfectly honest isn’t saying very much; the survival horror element of the game. To say that Shade is dripping in mood and suspense is a bit much, it’s a little moist perhaps - not enough to merit a call to the plumbers, but in its own cornball way it has some atmospheric elements. Then again a game that includes wrathful angels, zombies, demons and ancient buildings would have to be seriously crap to screw that up.

Not that it doesn’t try. Although most survival horror games have terrible voice acting and dialogue, Shade’s attempt at this art form is particularly dire. The way in which your character says ‘it’s locked’ with a mouthful of phlegm when you try and deviate from your linear course is especially annoying.

Puzzles are of the pull switch/push box variety, often requiring you to turn into a demon in order to use your super demon strength, which is hardly the earth shattering innovation the hype would have you believe. Still it makes a change from hitting dullard monsters or falling from badly designed jumps.

Size isn’t everything

What Shade doesn’t lack is quantity. However, the thirty hour playing time is a bit of a slog; the developers’ time would have better spent on improving the quality instead. Multiple endings are promised (although not in the code we played), although quite why you’d want to play through this once, let alone twice, is beyond us.

Ultimately Shade comes across as dated and rushed. If we had a penny for every bug or piece of glitchy physics we’d seen we would have a pretty hefty penny jar. In the end what could have been a potentially potent mix of gaming genres has turned out to be a below average hotchpotch of half-baked execution.