Shadwen Reviews

Shadwen is ranked in the 9th percentile of games scored on OpenCritic.
3 / 10.0
Jun 27, 2016

Overall, I think Shadwen could be a good game, but for whatever reason I was unable to play it as the developer intended. Other reviewers don’t seem to have encountered the same issue as I had, so perhaps it’s just a one-off. Consider perusing other reviews before making a purchase decision, reader, as I am going to have to give Shadwen a low score. Ultimately, I found it to be unplayable.

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3 / 10
May 22, 2016

Shadwen is a stealth-action game in which there's no action and the stealth is completely undermined by counter-productive design choices that defy logic or reason. The whole package suffers from a distinct lack of polish and is chock full of half-baked ideas and badly implemented mechanics. It's a Frankenstein's monster of a game stitched together from the dead bits of other, better games, but ultimately it possesses the heart and soul of none of them. There's no reason to recommend Shadwen to anybody other than prospective game developers looking for a lesson in what not to do.

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3 / 10
May 17, 2016

Honestly, Shadwen feels like it needed more time in development, both to work on its core ideas and bring them to fruition. The bland environments, the lack of an interesting plot, the technical issues, and the various gimmicks makes Shadwen a poor stealth and assassination game. At the very least, it tries to do something a little bit different, but simply doesn’t pull it off.

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Metro GameCentral
Unknown
Top Critic
3 / 10
May 18, 2016

Lots of interestingly odd ideas but although the basic stealth action more or less works the escort element and poor AI ruins a potentially promising premise.

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4 / 10.0
May 17, 2016

Shadwen presents great concepts and ideas for a stealth game, and the few moments where it all works out are satisfying, but I just do not understand why Frozenbyte launched the game in this state. From the refinement of the gameplay to the story, everything feels half-assed and not like a finalized product. In the current state, I cannot recommend this game.

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4 / 10
May 26, 2016

For some hardcore stealth fans, Shadwen’s gameplay might be the kick they need to enjoy the genre’s true constraints once again. But to anyone else, it’s losses weigh more than the high points. There’s substance, but no flavor, scope, but no size. To everyone else, the game will likely feel like a case of lost ambition.

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GBAtemp
Top Critic
4 / 10.0
May 16, 2016

From a first glance, Shadwen should be pretty great. Everything seems to look good and gives the impression that this game is totally finished. Then you make it past the first area and you quickly realize that Frozenbyte hasn't learned anything from their Trine 3 experience. Shadwen could be a promising game. There's a lot of potential with time manipulation, and if they could fix the AI this might even be worth a playthrough. But as it presently stands, I can't recommend this game.

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4 / 10.0
May 23, 2016

A disappointing stealth title that could have been so much more, giving you little more than a few hours of enjoyment before everything begins to grate on you.

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4 / 10.0
May 17, 2016

The few times the game opens up to let the player make use of their high level of mobility are incredibly memorable, and the world building makes it feel like we’re only scratching the surface of this world. That’s not enough to make me recommend it, of course, but they do make Shadwen’s shortcomings all the more painful.

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45 / 100
May 18, 2016
Shadwen - Quick Game Review video thumbnail
4.5 / 10.0
May 24, 2016

A mediocre third-person stealth effort revolving around a singular gimmick that is both intriguing and also damning to its ambitions, Shadwen is nowhere near the lofty standard that we would expect from the house that Trine built.

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4.8 / 10.0
May 25, 2016

In the end, Shadwen is a game that I so badly wanted to love but even with all its quirks and interesting mechanics, I couldn’t get past its bland levels, disappointing story and odd gameplay hiccups. A shame, really, as it could’ve been something special. Instead it’s nothing more than average, at best. The interesting gameplay mechanics found in Shadwen do little to hide the fact that the game is pretty boring and has a story that hardly amounts to anything.

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5 / 10.0
Jun 13, 2016

Shadwen tries too hard to be more interesting by adding in more gimmicks, but because of how they didn’t really work well together to make a cohesive stealth experience, and are mired with how badly they were implemented, the game itself just ends up feeling like an incoherent mess. The game has potential, but it fails to live up to any of the features it tries to advertise. So many other games do it’s individual gimmicks better so you’re better off playing them since Shadwen does not do a very good job of combining said gimmicks together.

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5 / 10.0
May 24, 2016

Shadwen boasts some cool mechanics and can even be entertaining at times, but it never truly feels like a cohesively good game as a whole. The repetitiveness of the levels, clunky physics and sub par story only hinder what could have been a great entry into the stealth genre.

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Ofisil
Top Critic
5 / 10
Jul 3, 2016

Shadwen's first few levels will surely give some amount of fun to those who like this type of games, and the fact that the main character has to keep a little girl out of sight will, initially, feel like quite the exciting concept. Unfortunately, gameplay-wise this is quite a flawed product, with its main problem being the fact that it requires doing the exact same thing for more than 10, almost identical, levels.

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Jun 1, 2016

The game’s a bit of a mess, with baffling AI at times (especially from your partner, who loves getting herself in trouble), and the freeze time mechanic having the habit of failing in the heat of something significant going on.

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5 / 10.0
May 27, 2016

Shadwen makes no bones about copying from other games. However, with the lack of compelling story-telling and gameplay, it fails to even accommodate interesting mechanics that other games handle better.

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5 / 10.0
May 24, 2016

Shadwen, unfortunately, has proved to be a messy bunch of ideas, unable to involve the player in its narrative context, which could be interesting, but has been developed too superficially. Same goes for the gameplay mechanics, made of concepts taken from other games and put together almost with no consistency.

Review in Italian | Read full review

5.5 / 10.0
May 17, 2016

Shadwen is a decent game at best and mediocre at worst. While not bad, it fails to build upon the mechanics it presents. What you do in the third chapter is largely the same as the final chapter: grappling to higher platforms, killing guards, and moving crates to help Lily move forward. Nothing new is presented, and what is already there is never combined in clever ways. About midway through a new enemy type is introduced, one that can only be killed by falling crates or air kills, but even that fails to introduce a significant change to the pace of gameplay. I really like its solution to failing midway through a level, but even that mechanic can’t save an otherwise okay game.

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Drew Leachman
Top Critic
5.5 / 10.0
May 26, 2016

Shadwen is not a bad game, but it is completely in the middle of the road for me.

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