admin | 
10 1st, 2009| 
If you like your shooters built on nostalgic value, Meridian4 and Frozenbyte’s Shadowgrounds might be up your alley. A top-down shooter in the vein of Smash TV with an atmospheric twist that borrows heavily from the Doom series, Shadowgrounds has simplistic mechanics but uses challenging gameplay to back them up. Unfortunately, challenging doesn’t always equate to fun, and in the case of Shadowgrounds, its difficulty doesn’t make the action any less monotonous as time goes on. Rather than testing your skill by throwing huge gangs of enemies at you, as many old-school top-down shooters tended to do, Shadowgrounds keeps its enemy attacks regulated to short bursts done to induce some kind of jump or scare in you. The trouble is that it’s not effective. Shadowgrounds is too campy to be even remotely moody or scary, and without the scares, the action just comes across as kind of flat after a while.
The top down shooter hasn’t gotten much love in recent years, especially on the PC. Kudos to Shadowgrounds for at least trying to kickstart the genre again.
