Shadow Archer

Genre: Top-Down Arcade

Players: 1

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Review:

Shadow Archer is a Top-Down Arcade-style game released on the Wii U in 2016. In this game, players take the role of the titular archer, who must fend off hordes of spiders and other beasts in a dark forest.

This game uses simple, 8-bit-style pixel art 2D visuals with a black background and simple character designs, backed by a chiptune rendition of the third movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata on repeat. Which… if you’re going to have a chiptune version of any classical piano solo on repeat, that’s a good one to choose, I guess.

The gameplay here is extremely simple. Spiders wander around the screen and you shoot them. Three hits kills a green spider, which then frequently either drops a heart you can use to refill your health, arrows to replenish your dwindling supply, or a single-use arrow power-up that instantly kills anything it touches after you fire it.

As you play through the game, there are progressively more difficult enemies, but none of them are especially smart or challenging. Really, the only difficulty here comes from the large number of them and your limited run speed. Beyond that, this is a pretty repetitive, boring game.

Will some people likely find some old-school charm in Shadow Archer? I suppose, sure. But there’s just not enough depth here to keep anyone entertained for long, and the sluggish controls and mindless enemies rob this experience of any fun it might otherwise have. Skip it.

tl;dr – Shadow Archer is an Arcade-style game where players take the role of the titular archer shooting arrows at spiders in a forest. This game is so simple it’s virtually pointless. Don’t bother with this one.

Grade: D

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