It might at first glance sound a bit odd to talk about reviewing an oldie here, for as far as we know it from the music industry oldies can mostly be found in the 50's, 60's or 70's; and this is an era where the roots of Shadowgrounds obviously don't lie. But, in the fast moving world of computer entertainment, even games having been released only 2 years ago must sometimes be afraid to be put rather quickly into the nursing home of gaming history. And Shadowgrounds is one of these games that really shouldn't be abandoned to that kind of fate. You want to know why? Read on.

It's basically about … ah well, we probably do have an oldie here … shooting things. You are Wesley Tyler and you are on that colonised planet, which was really awesome, but, to put it short, it's not that awesome anymore when you arrive in the game. So your mission basically is to transform it back to awesomeness, which you mostly, if not only, do with upgrading weapons that you will find on your way and using them against hordes of enemies. Oh yes, there is also a story to it, which means that mostly in cut scenes you will meet some people on your way commanding you at first to find some keycard, secondly to shoot things and then eventually deciding to die. Which is of course very much supported by an alien race; these are the ones you shoot at because you don't like friends getting killed in cut scenes. Not to forget the crates standing around everywhere, which you can also … oh, you know that one, don't you?

But of course I wouldn't write this text if it weren't for the fact that I sincerely want to recommend this game to the global gamers out there, so let's stop with the endless enumeration of somehow really antiquated elements and quickly skip to the fact that this game is just some very solid, funny and motivating fun.

The foundation of this is the atmosphere which the developers were able to achieve with means as simple as the lighting of your surroundings and the music accompanying you on your journey. While you are walking through the several indoors and outdoors environments, they quite often don't look as boring as they actually are: and this is achieved with the help of illumination and even nowadays rather good-looking effects supporting that. This is where your flashlight comes in, because you will want to switch that on when you are entering low-lit or even pitch-dark areas, while you hear footsteps, grunting noises and other noises you, to put it simple, just don't ever want to hear; especially with the lights switched off and even more especially when you know that some friends just recently got killed by the source of these strange noises in a scripted sequence. This flashlight is not just a nice but useless accessory, it rather adds a tactical component to the gameplay. Some enemies will run away from the light, some will be pulled towards you by it and when you proceed you will also get to know enemies that you can only see in the light you cast. The flashlight also adds to the atmosphere with the shadows that it throws, making it sometimes very difficult to distinguish between a harmless shadow and a deathly monster lurking in the dark. The sound and music do a very good job too, being well composed and context-sensitive.

The upgrades that you will find for your weapons during the game are the biggest motivation that it will give you, and they are not useless after all. Every upgrade is somehow effective, but of course you will never be able to acquire all of them. And, not surprisingly: Upgrades for powerful weapons cost more than upgrades for your standard pistol. Although I would like to encourage you to push this pistol to its limits and to then try it out on some really dangerous enemies later on in the game, instead of pulling the minigun out. I had very much fun only using the pistol; although I sometimes had to pay with death. Which led to repeating the whole level.

What did you just say? "Dude, press the Reload button?" Oh, I'm afraid to tell you this, but: there is no such thing. You've got five tries per level, and if you fail with these you will just have to start it all over again. This very rarely happened to me and I have to say that the game is not really easy, but mostly fair, so this absence of free saving didn't really demotivate me. It might be antiquated, but: We're talking about an oldie here, right?

But we are, to get this right, not talking about a game for old computers. If you really want the lighting effects and the game to work on very high details, your machine should not be much older than the game itself, I'm afraid. This is in some ways not understandable, because apart from the effects there's nothing really ravishingly beautiful to this game. However: I played it with medium settings and it didn't affront my eyes seriously.

So if you are not into shooters you have probably closed this posting long ago. If you need an intelligent story you should at the latest close it now. But if you would like some motivating, challenging, sometimes scary and mostly pleasant game in which you don't have to invest too much time (and if you probably liked Expendable back in 1999), then you should really consider buying this one, which shouldn't cost you much anymore. And which is, by the way, also playable in a co-op mode with four friends via Gamepads.

In this case, tell your friends not to forget to shoot at the crates. You already knew that?

Keep it in mind for Shadowgrounds: Survivor, soon to be released. It might be of use.

(if you are interested to try playing Shadowgrounds now you can download a demo here)