In the beginning, there was Acclaim. Maskers of many good games, and seemingly as many bad ones. Masters of the licensed tie-in game, they weaved tales of dinosaur hunters, foul-mouthed children, and roid-raging police officers alike. Then came the game that in my humble opinion put Acclaim on the map, ShadowMan. Released in 1999 on the Nintendo 64, PlayStation, Dreamcast and PC to moderate fanfare, it was a sprawling third-person shooter of metroidvanian influence. The scope of the game was quite massive for the era, despite having a large amount of planned content cut out to ship it in time. Regardless of any cuts, the Nintendo 64 version was amazing, quite easily one of my favorite games on the system. I don't think I've ever played a game that just drips with so much atmosphere, with the dark ambience just oozing from every pore of this game's being.
The voodoo-based trappings of ShadowMan's story paint a colorful backdrop to the game word, and the visual presentation is very unique. The visual aesthetic is wonderfully twisted as gothic architecture gives way to rusted industrial brutalism, and structures made of stitched skin with bone supports. The whole world has a real lived-in(or died-in) feel to it, and you can almost smell the blood and corrosion caking the surfaces. The soundscape of ShadowMan can simultaneously be a treat for the ears, but also nightmare fuel at the same time. The haunting ambient melodies that play as you traverse Deadside give way to the horrific sounds of torture and surgical machinery as you traverse the Asylum.
Now
there original game holds up pretty well, but NightDive wasn't
satisfied with that. They got Kaiser to rip out ShadowMan's soul and
transplant it into the KEX engine, with all the modern conveniences that
such a process entails, and on top of that they have restored the
majority of the cut content, had the composer remaster the original
soundtrack and compose new tracks for the cut areas, and then reskinned
the entire package with HD textures, uncensored the models, and added
improved rendering. As if that wasn't enough, they then updated the
control scheme, re-did the physics, and then shoved a SECOND Violator up
it's arse (hope it fits!).
All of these enhancements seriously made the PC version of ShadowMan Remastered a must have, and that resulted in it being at the time my favorite way to experience the game. However now that it has been ported over to the Nintendo Switch with all of the bells and whistles intact, and the full suite of graphical options as seen on PC, not to mention the new gyro controls, the Switch version is by far the definitive way to play ShadowMan. All in all NightDive, Kaiser and the KEX team have
outdone themselves. The Loa smile on this remaster, as well as this amazing Switch port, and I wholeheartedly recommend checking it out.
