Shadow Warrior
Worth it · Shooter · 2013
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
BUY IT.
Worth it at $2.99.
- Length
- 12.3h
- Value
- $0.24/hr
- Reviews
- 92% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 2 GB of memory, ATI Radeon HD 3870/NVIDIA 8800 GT or better, 15 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
Shadow Warrior is a bold reimagining of the classic 3D Realms’ shooter from independent developer Flying Wild Hog (Hard Reset) starring the legendary and quick-witted warrior Lo Wang.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
It has never been cheaper than $2.99. That was November 2022. Its cuts run 85 percent off as a rule. There have been 100 in the 13 years tracked, about 6 weeks apart. Today's $2.99 at 90 percent off matches the lowest price in the record.
Take the discount away and it is a 65. With it, 84.
Value puts it in the top 5 percent of the games it competes with. It is pricier than 90 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 89 percent. Among the games that feel like it, STAR WARS™ Jedi Knight - Jedi Academy™ ($9.99, scores 91) beats it on value, while it beats Shadow Warrior 2 ($2.99, scores 77).
Critics scored it 74. Players sit 18 points higher at 92 percent, which usually means a game that plays better than it reviews.
Steam's global achievement data says about 17 percent of players ever finish it. On a 12.3-hour game, that is a lot of paid-for hours most people never see. This site sampled 800 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 7 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written May 2020 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 75 percent of the 1,567 reviews written there were positive, against 92 percent overall, and those are 10 percent of everything written about it. It sells extras on top of the sticker price (cosmetic); the score docks it lightly for that.
12.3 hours to finish it, 36 to exhaust it. The completionist tail is 2.9 times the campaign.
It carries Valve's Deck Verified rating and runs 12.3 hours, about as long as a handheld game wants to be.
The drop-off
57% start to 17% finishA normal fall-off for a game this long. Steam global achievements
Players
20 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
The most surprising part about this game is it came out BEFORE Wolfenstein The New Order. Feels like a run of the mill early 2010's reboot of a 90's classic. It's alright. Pretty impressive for an indie studio, so that deserves some praise.
Shadow warrior start a cool game to play as wang and have lots of fun. Definitely Recommended!!! SW2 is the amazing of the series.
Shadow Warrior is basically what happens when someone decides that a normal FPS isn't ridiculous enough and adds a katana, demons, one-liners, and a protagonist who desperately needs a filter. The gunplay is enjoyable, but the sword is what really makes the game stand out. I honestly didn't expect the swordplay to be this good. Most FPS games treat melee as something you use when you're out of ammunition, but Shadow...
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
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Shadow Warrior scores 84/100 on the BANG Score (worth it). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/233130/shadow-warriorThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 12, price as of Sep 24.
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