3.5/5 ★ – hunkypet's review of Shadows: Awakening.

This little gem was a blind buy. I saw it for a ludicrously low price and thought why the hell not. It turned out to be a great hidden gem. Shadows Awakening is an Action RPG from the isometric point of view. The gameplay revolves around that classic Diablo style of RPG where it’s like a dungeon looter. The catch here is that once you clear an area, the area stays cleared. Now that may sound strange from a looter style game but trust me the game throws enough loot at you to keep you entertained. The combat is fairly simplistic but a lot of fun with a few special moves to level up in a satisfying skill ark. You can also switch between 4 characters on the fly really able to create on the fly tactics and character specific skills stack and create huge damage to enemies. The hook/gimmick of this game is one character sees the world in the shadow realm, so this creates two plains to explore at all times with different loot and enemies. Some enemies even have different forms in different plains that must be defeated in a certain order. Especially bosses. My biggest gripe with the game was it runs at 30FPS and action games like this really strive at a silky smooth 60FPS. You do get used to it but it’s a-bit janky at first. Another big complaint is how to manage your inventory it is extremely laborious and gets dull quick. The story is pretty standard run of the mill RPG stuff with some decent writing and voice acting.. bar a couple who were so bad they were good. The side missions are rewarding and help bulk up the world building and lore. The locations you visit are all varied and interesting, each with separate location dynamics and quirks. The visuals are not going to blow your mind but are colourful and detailed enough. I played this on my XONE and it did look noticeably blurry at 900p on a 1080p screen and had some horrendous load times and frame rate issues during hectic battles. I got my XSX while halfway through this game and while blown up to a 4K screen it looked as blurry as ever though due to the XSX extra power environments popped abit more and you could see more detail. It also cut the load times down to a few seconds and cleared up all frame rate issues. This was the first RPG I played in a long time and is a great RPG to ease yourself back into the genre, it has fun combat, interesting dynamics and a linear focused story that lasts on 20 + hours. Played on XONE & XSX