Shadows of the Damned begins with a lengthy tutorial, but the game needs it. The actual shooting elements are bog-standard, but since you're taking a trip to the very bowels of the underworld to save your girlfriend, you're going to need to know how things work down there, and it's not very intuitive. Why do you shoot goat heads on the wall to dispel the darkness? Who knows, but you do. Is there a reason the damned will only eat strawberries, brains, and eyeballs before they'll let you through a door? I assume there is, but you never learn it. This doesn't take away the need to find strawberries, brains, and eyeballs to move through the world.

There are rules in the underworld, you see, and you have the help of a floating skull named Johnson who will explain them to you. He knows that there are very important people in hell, and their reward for dying with style is the ability to keep their genitals. All this may be fascinating, but you're only job is find your girl, and she's being killed and resurrected countless times in front of you, just for the sake of everyone's misery. This isn't a game for the lighthearted.

Shadows of the Damned xbox*, ps3 Release Date: now

now MSRP: $59.99 Official site * = platform reviewed

It is, however, very funny. In one section Johnson, who also transforms into your many weapons, dials a sex phone line in order to get... erect. This turns him into an even longer, more powerful weapon that you use like a turret. Your character's name is Garcia Hotspur, but he usually places a curse in the middle, just for good measure. He's covered in scars and tattoos, and he's not in the business of taking crap from anyone.

This is a game that stands proudly in the grindhouse tradition, and even your saved game is referred to as a "road movie." The music adds a lot to the mood, and the game exhibits a certain style that makes it feel very different from the third-person action games we're used to. The tension between light and dark is a major gameplay mechanic, and if you stay in the inky blackness for too long, you lose energy. You can collect hearts to temporarily protect yourself against the dark, and if you need more energy, you have to drink a bottle of booze. To return an area to the light, just find and shoot the aforementioned goat's head. Barrels filled with "pressurized" light are a good way to take out groups of the bad guys.

Through all this you learn the stories and the ways of the underworld, and even with all the penis jokes and humor in the dialog between Hotspur and Johnson, it's a fascinating place, filled with creepy demons to meet and kill. The boss battles are also something to experience, with some large, crazy-looking undead enemies to destroy. You'll have to use all the weapons at your disposal to fight your way to your goals, and they sound and feel great. After killing each boss or finishing each chapter you're given a blue gem, which is used to automatically upgrade your weapons. By finding red gems you can choose how to upgrade the damage, reload speed, or capacity of your guns.

The weapon system is interesting: each weapon is created by Johnson as he transformed, and as you switch between them, the torch you hold when not holding a gun changes color. It's a neat way of showing what gun you have equipped, even when you're not aiming it.

The shooting is wonderful, the enemies are diverse enough to keep your interest, and the weapons all feel powerful—wait until you see the fully upgraded machine gun—but the game does have some problems.

Was this not quite finished?

While the game plays very well, you'll find some disappointing issues with the presentation. Screen tearing is a problem, and textures sometimes take way too long to fill in. Sometimes the voices don't match the flapping lips at all, and at one point Johnson seemed to be saying a line that was meant for Hotspur.

At one point I ran into either a bug or a terribly designed puzzle, and I had to reload from a previous save to advance. There were a few places that sound dropped out entirely. None of these things were enough to hurt my enjoyment of the game, but they were still annoying occurrences.

The game's ending does seem to drag on for a bit, but the final scenes are worth the wait. This is very much a game that's about the journey, not the destination, and it's very exciting to be playing a new IP with a character that's much fun, and written by people who know how to make middle-school humor funny.

Verdict: Buy