Genre: Action/Adventure
Publisher: Cenega
Developer: Black Element
Release Date: October 4, 2004

Mommy, Mommy, make the bad game stop!

The release name of the game is Shade: Wrath of Angels, but a more fitting title would have been Shade: Frustration at its Finest, but that’s probably more honesty than the developers wanted to put on the box. There’s a decent game in Shade, but you’re going to have to dig pretty deep through a lot of unpleasantness to find it.

Shade is billed as a horror/survival game and to a certain degree, it’s successful at that, but for the wrong reasons: Shade is a horror-show of bad design decisions, and keeping yourself alive during the game is extremely difficult.

The game starts with you receiving a letter from your brother, who’s an archeologist doing research work in Italy. Apparently he’s been wrapped up in his work; it’s been a few years since the last missive from him. He’s gotten himself into a spot of trouble and needs your help.

So, off you go to help him out. When you get there, you find a deserted town and empty hotel. Well, empty except for these demons that just start popping in and out like an anchovy-induced nightmare. After that, it’s off to a, naturally, abandoned church where you learn your brother annoyed some gods and is now imprisoned. You volunteer to help him out, whereupon you learn you need to free four Fallen Angels from alternate universes to reverse the curse. As plots go, it’s not bad. The problem is, the only time there’s a reference to the plot is during the cut scenes, and none while you are actually playing the game. And given how often you’ll be reloading the game, that’s a bad thing; I frequently forgot what the point of the game was.

Ultimately, there are four things that really hurt Shade in the long run: a reliance on a checkpoint based save game and healing system; entirely too many jumping puzzles; an AI that’s extremely incompetent; and frustrating difficulty of monsters.

For some reason, the concept of forcing you to save games in specific places is coming back in vogue; I hate it, and Shade really helps intensify that feeling, especially in the early part of the game. I kid you not, there was one 45 minute portion of the game that took me over three hours to complete, solely because I had to go back to almost the beginning of the level after I’d screw up near the end.

The placement of the checkpoints makes no sense either. In one case I found two save points about three minutes from each other (one was easy to back-track to after you defeated the monsters again), only to find the next save point about 45 minutes away at the conclusion of some pretty hefty jumping puzzles. I understand that the developers are trying to heighten the survival portion of the game by making you fight towards each save point, but there just aren’t enough of them.

It’s made worse by having checkpoint based health potions. To heal yourself, you stick your magic sword in a hole in the ground (boy, that one looks wrong, doesn’t it) and that heals you. Like the save-game points, there aren’t enough of them, adding to mounting frustration.

It seems like the developers realized the game was running short and the quick fix was to put in some jumping puzzles. Coupled with the checkpoint system, the jumping puzzles just keep adding to the frustration by forcing you to reload because you didn’t jump soon enough, late enough, or missed your target by an inch or more; there’s even one incredibly annoying jump that requires you to catch the edge of a platform. If the jumps were intermixed with better puzzles it wouldn’t be so bad, but as it is now, the puzzles are related to three kinds: jumps; throw-the-levers; and find-the-items.

The AI is extremely poor. The monsters will rarely leave the room they are in, allowing you to stand outside the room and blast them with your pistol – I’m pretty sure the scarcity of pistol ammo is the developers answer to that problem. The developers also seem to have answered the dumb AI problem by simply overwhelming you with monsters. If you run into more than two (and sometimes two is more than enough), you’re in for a battle to stay in the game, and it’s exasperating to have to reload the game because it took five minutes to kill the monsters instead of three, leaving you with low health and no way to save or heal. There were frequent times I was forced to decide the lesser of two evils: trying to fight through a series of battles with next-to-no health, or re-loading an earlier saved game hoping this time I’d finish those battles with more health; both choices stank.

The game does let you turn into a demon, but his attacks aren’t every effective making him only useful for solving the crate puzzles that require his strength. It’s a nice idea, but poor implementation makes it a gimmick, not a useful tool. Along the way you’ll collect demon flames, which allow you to summon the demon and you’ll also find stores that will let you trade flames for spells, but I never had enough flames to get anything so I can’t tell you if they helped out at all.
In addition to a pistol, you’ll come into possession of a magic sword, which will become your main weapon through the game. The combat as a whole is uninspiring. You don’t get any special attacks that I could see, so the combat is mostly point, click and pray.

The monsters fall into the zombies, undead warriors and fire-hurling mages (oh, my!) category. They look decent, but after the first hundred or so they lose their appeal. The AI tells them to rush en-mass, and your strategy involves trying to maneuver them so you are only fighting one at time.

The bright side to the game, and what kept me going, is the levels themselves are decent to look at it. While Shade doesn’t have cutting-edge graphics, the level designers have done a good job at creating an immersive environment. You’ll travel through a handful of time zones, including the Middle Ages and Ancient Egypt, and in each case the levels look excellent. The sound effects add nicely to the immersion and the soundtrack is appropriately Hollywoodly.

There are also some stability issues and some interesting bugs in the game, too. I did have an above normal amount of crashes, one of which rebooted my computer. I also had a save game get corrupted – and I’m sure you can tell how thrilled that made me, given how scarce they are to begin with. And, of course, there was the previously mentioned bug with the AI getting hung up in rooms.

If the designers had toned down the difficulty so it allowed for more margin of error, increased the save points (or better, allowed for quick save) and put in more healing spots, I could look past the jumping puzzles and insipid AI. As it stands now, the game is more wearisome than fun. I like my games to be challenging; I want them to test my limits; I don’t want them to test my sanity, which is what Shade did most of the time. I felt like I was progressing forward in inches, constantly getting pushed back. It was as if I was a penalty-laden team in the NFL; I’d go forward two yards, only to pull a 15-yard penalty, forcing me to go over the same ground again and again.

If you’re the type who doesn’t mind not enough save and health points, you might enjoy Shade; for me, the lack of them just compounded the frustration of the other issues. While the plot’s not going to win any Hugo awards, it suffices, but there aren’t enough ties to it during the levels making it mostly forgettable. The bottom line is, the game doesn’t seem to have gone through enough balance testing and QA testing.

Score: 4.0/10