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New month, new review! Shadow Fight: Shades is a decent game, but has a LOT of issues before I'd consider it a "good" game. Beware, this review DOES get into the more technical terms and Fighting Game Jargon (dw there's a TL;DR at the bottom)
So, as per usual, there are a few states players can be in: Standing (Neutral), Downed, Staggered, or Jumping. There are some others, but these are the MAIN states a player can be in.
In Neutral, your player automatically blocks hits without input. In Staggered, the player cannot move or take action (this is to allow multi hit attacks to all connect.) And in Downed, the player can be hit one time before being given Invincibility to prevent infinite downed combos.
If the player is hit into a wall, they "bump" into it, being given invincibility frames for the entire interaction. THIS HAPPENS DURING BLOCK, TOO. KEEP THIS IN MIND.
So, the problem with the game is first the walls. See, if you attack the AI and they block the attack, but bump into the wall, they get invincibility, AND can recover possibly faster than your attack. You can literally get PUNISHED for attacking them near the wall. This makes the wall easily the best tool for AI, which is bad because the AI always seems to hug the wall.
The second problem is with Double Sweep. In the first game, this was easily the best attack in the game. If you did a double sweep on someone, and both attacks landed, they became downed, allowing for a third hit. Now, the game just staggers the opponent twice, with no downs. It went from being a good move to pressure AI, into being the worst tool in the game. Because it takes forever to recover, if the AI bumps a wall, you get punished HEAVILY for it.
Because of how staggered is changed, there's no consistent way to down the AI unless you get a critical hit or throw them, which sucks because Downing enemies made it significantly easier to win even impossible matchups.
The next problem (and arguably the biggest) is the Downed Glitch. If you hit a downed player, they can AUTOMATICALLY go into Staggered state, instead of being downed again. This allows for some REALLY stupid combos (I showed one up top.) BUT can also completely ruin a combo at the same time. Entirely rng dependent based on how many crits you get. Theoretically, you could infinitely string combos together if your RNG allows lots of critical.
The biggest problem of the game is RNG and capitalization by Nekki. You NEED good shades to win the battles, and you NEED good stats to win 10 battles in a row with only ~5% health recovery total (not between battles, TOTAL health recovery is 5% ish. That's TINY.)
And Nekki capitalized on this. Crappy shade roll? They conveniently put an ad button to reroll! How kind! Need more resources? They have an ad for the idle resource collection to gain more! Nice! More equips? They have a chest that can be opened once daily with ADS! WOW, SO GENEROUS!!! Nekki is predatory with these ads. You get one after EVERY battle, and one for ANY advantage you can get. Highly P2W.
Nekki makes the game purposely unfair for players, a complete uphill battle, requiring good RNG and amazing skill, then sell you the solution to deal with your frustration better. This game just sucks.
TL;DR
👍 Pros:
Decent music
gameplay feels a bit like Shadow Fight 2 (if you LOVED the grind aspect of SF2)
👎 Cons:
P2W, ADS 2 Win
Grindy
Very Unfair Battle system
"Merge system" capitalization
Battles are less Skillful, more RNG dependent than ever.
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