Lets find that ancient Spanish Gold gang, who's with me?

Greatest Live Arcade game ever. That’s your review right there, throw five stars in front and take the rest of the day off, you’ve earned it.

Okay so maybe I should qualify that five word review. Don’t want to seem unprofessional do we? After all, we’re a honed team of media professionals, not your run of the mill game blog, we have ideas… and stuff.

Shadow Complex sees you playing as Jason Flemming, a character who looks, acts and sounds (voiced by the same actor, Nolan North) identical to Nathan Drake from Uncharted. In fact the only discernible difference is that Jason is a lapsed soldier trained by his dad but never actually served and Nathan is a treasure hunting adventurer.

You are kids are sooo getting of my lawn, you don't even know it

Shadow Complex is actually set in the Empire universe, created by Chair Entertainment design leads Donald and Geremy Mustard. It postulates a not far in the future America in which the assassination of the President and Vice President is quickly followed by a left wing military force called the Progressive Restoration seizing New York and announcing their leader as the new President. While the concept was created by the Mustard brothers the idea was pitched to Orson Scott Card to write novels in the same universe to preface a series of games, of which Shadow Complex is the first. While we’re kind of insulated from this kind of thing in Australia, the Empire series has an uncomfortably bent political stance. The first novel, Empire, is a right wing wet dream with ex special forces republican politicians saving the day single handed against the left wing Progressive Restoration who basically look and act suspiciously like Cobra, as in the GI Joe Cobra. Curse those weak willed but incredibly heavily armed and brutal liberals! The idea of a new civil war in the US between the right and left might have seemed eerie four years ago, but in the new magical Obamaland the US has become it just seems a tad silly.

In summary the plot and dialogue are by far the weakest feature of Shadow Complex (apologies to Peter David but dude, you can do so much better). Just pretend the bad guy is Cobra Commander, which isn’t hard to do, and you’ll be fine.

Shadow Complex makes nature hikes AWESOME!

But the gameplay, the gameplay is the sweetest of candy. The game rolls out in a 3D environment of which you only have 2D access, very similar to Chair’s last game Undertow. You begin the game with a torch and an untucked tshirt, but by games end you’ll have the ability to triple jump with rocket boots, run on water, swing around on a Bionic Commando riffed tether line and do all sorts of cool things. As you progress in the game you’ll find various pieces of a suit of power armour that grants you all sorts of abilities. Not to mention looking very cool.

You will notice as you progress through the game that there are certain areas that show up as one of four colours under your torchlight and ledges that no amount of jumping will reach. That’s because Shadow Complex, much like it’s mother Metroid and emo father Castlevania, is all about back tracking. While this would be a negative for most games Shadow Complex manages to keep it fresh and fun as you scoot back and forth across the one giant level, unlocking new areas and opening secret doors between sections you previously couldn’t move between. It’s all about the discovery and exploration and it’s a lot of fun.

Foam, foam, foam, I love foam, foam, foam

While you can take out most enemies with a melee move (demonstrated with a terrific little Bourne inspired series of animations) there are numerous weapons to use against the Restoration. You start of with the pistol, quickly move to an MP5 and then onto an M4 before getting hold of the futuristic coil rifle. There’s also one more firearm hidden in the game that’s well worth seeking out. Your primary fire ammo also never runs dry and you’ll only have to pause to reload when shooting bad guys. But your secondary fire modes do have a limited amount of ammo; over the course of the game you’ll get grenades, then the foam upgrade (which freezes enemies in place) and finally the rocket launcher upgrade to use as secondary weapons. While these upgrades can be used to destroy enemies (and build mountains of foam to reach power ups) their real focus is to access previously inaccessible areas. The gameplay combination of exploring and simple arcade shooting can keep you playing for hours on end.

there has been a fair bit of criticism that Shadow Complex isn't the most original game and it might be fair to point at Shadow Complex and squeal ‘clone’ in your shrillest voice, pointing out that almost every single element of the gameplay has been lifted from Super Metroid. It’s worth noting that these games aren’t actually getting made anymore. Nintendo hasn’t made a Metroid styled Metroid game in ages, preferring to shoe horn the franchise into the FPS genre. Meanwhile Castlevania’s last outing was a one on one fighter game that caused long term series fans to vomit into their cupper fingers after playing it for three minutes. Shadow Complex doesn’t feel like a rip off, it feels more like a heart broken love letter to Metroid. If you loved Super Metroid, then rather than throwing paint, you should applaud Shadow Complex for carrying the torch of 2D action adventure games after it was dropped a long time ago.

Judo kick!

Visually Shadow Complex looks terrific. Graphics and animation wise its often hard to believe it’s not a full retail game. While it doesn’t last long, an average playthrough taking about five hours and a bit longer to get one hundred percent for your items and powerups, it begs to be played again. It’s just one of those games where you’ll want to skip the end credits and get straight back into it on a harder difficulty level. There’s even a set of Proving Ground challenge missions to score medals on that could suck up hundreds of hours of your life. While the game itself isn’t that difficult, the proving ground challenges will have you grinding your teeth if that’s your desire.

The game isn’t without a few small flaws beyond the script and dialogue. Shooting into the background at enemies can be a drag as the game sometimes auto aims for you and some times doesn’t. When it does you will more than likely nudge the right analog stick to make sure and aim away from the background. You’re safest bet is to just keep shooting until whatever you are shooting at is dead. It feels sloppy when everything else about the controls feels right. The boss battles are also a touch disappointing. Don’t be surprised if you make it through the game without dying at these moments as the bosses, despite looking cool, are all too easily defeated. The bad guys are also leaning to the generic side of things. An army of faceless bad guys you breeze through without a second thought. There’s barely ten different types of enemies in the whole game and half of those are guys with different types of guns and the other half are spider robots with different types of guns.

These issues are pretty insignificant though, mosquito bites on the hide of the sexiest rhinoceros you’ve ever seen. They might cause the big smile plastered over you’re face for most of your play time to twitch for a second, but for the most part you’ll just keep on playing. Shadow Complex is the type of game that turns people into gamers, makes them fall in love with the medium and get even more excited about a sequel. That’s what you’ll be thinking about once you’ve wrapped up Shadow Complex, when oh when is the next one coming out?

So what's your fastest speed run in Shadow Complex? Tell us in the forum.