Shadowgrunds

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 premise of Shadowgrounds ought to be eerily familiar to fans of the Doom franchise. You're a lowly mechanic on a space base parked on one of Jupiter's moons. One day, all hell breaks loose when a crew of creepy alien creatures shows up on the scene and starts wreaking havoc. Amid many moments of verbally wondering what the hell is going on, you're forced into battle, shooting your way through the scads and scads of nasty aliens. The game tries to inject some story into the whole equation by having you interact with other survivors on the base and even by out-and-out thieving the whole thing from Doom 3 where you'd walk around, reading people's computer screens and PDA's to piece together a picture of how this all came about. Unfortunately, none of it is interesting. The dialogue is generally pretty stilted, and the snippets of story just aren't all that intriguing.

Minimum System Requirements:

OS: Windows 2000/XP
Processo Pentium 4 @ 1.5 GHz
Memory: 384 MB
Hard Drive: 1 GB Free
Video Memory: 128 MB
Sound Card: DirectX Compatible
DirectX: 9.0c