Hi, so I’ve just finished my first session of Shadow Lords and this is my whole experience:
I started the game with Jago (One of my favorite characters) alongside Kim Wu (One character I’m not too familiar to use with), and inmediately I had the choice to use either Riptor or Fulgore to have an Ultratech character. Since I am a terrible Riptor player, I decided to go with Fulgore (But again, I’m not an expert with Fulgore)
I played my first time in Godlike difficult level.
First the story: I was amazed by the fact that Kan-Ra was brainwashed by Gargos to open portals. Since the story doesn’t explain it, I’m supposing that after the portals were open, Kan-Ra was freed of this mind control and joined sides with the Killer Instincts group. Also, the story doesn’t explain with, but I’m supposing that EVERYONE of the playres joins forces to stop Gargos since is a much more powerful being than those of Aria, Ultratech, Kan-Ra and so on.
In my personal opinion, I would like to know more of these stories. I haven’t finished the Season 2 stories on Arcade Mode, and I only have read the stories published on the Ultra Combo pages, but I want to know if Aria knew that this thread was far more dangerous than mankind alone and decided to help with Ultratech to ensure the survival of the mankind, and I want to know if Fulgore and Riptor were changed in their instructions to help the mankind. Also what are the other warriors thinking about this… this is a whole lot new plot for KI!!!
Anyway. Let’s keep going.
The menu is very simple and concise: Point for the developers. With this mode I just want to know where to go and no waste time since you need to manage your artifacts, materials and characters. I have no objections in this part, very good job.
The fact of having 3 characters as your mains is a very good idea and makes it feel with that RPG-like experience of growing them and make them stronger with the artifacts. It encourages you to take wise decisions about which fights to pick up and which ones to send a character with support to have a high percentaje of winning at the cost of having less rewards is very good. This also helps in the cases that your team has a character that you are not very familiar with and want to avoid fighting with him/her.
The Godlike difficult was worth the name. The first fights I didn’t equipped artifacts neither gods, so when I faced Mimics with Power Level III or greater I was seeing how my lifebar went from full to half in one single combo of my oponnent. I inmediately thinked that this was because of the Godlike difficult, but that it was very frustrating and demoralizing because you needed to Combo Break every combo and try to loss the least amount of energy against oponnents.
After a few fights and after gaining some materials and coins, I realized that for this mode I would need the artifacts to buff my characters and have a change against some of the most hard enemies (Specially the hordes, when you need to face 2 or more Mimics with just one character). This also is part of the experience and is OK, but I realized that to have a very good run you need to play a lot of Shadow Lords sessions to have a lot of materials and items, and have a better opportunity on another sessions. You can buy Gods, materials and artifacts just with the coins, but you need to play a lot.
The corruption and stages is very good also. As you progress further on the game, you are aware that you can’t play all the scenarios and that you need to wisely select where to fight and with whom, since your character can fail the mission and you be forced to use a revival. If you run out of coins or materials and you can’t revive a character, is a very hard blow to your chances of survive.
One aspect that I really, really liked a lot of Shadow Lords is the mini-stories that are told to you before the fights where you have to take choices of what to do. And that choices have consequences. You can be a very cautious player avoiding any risk, or you can be a very risky one that will check everything at the cost of having less life, fight more characters or lost some items. Big risk, big rewards!!!
I was a little dissapointed with the way the characters backgrounds is revealed on the gameplay. You need to beat some characters to have access at their backstory, but when you have it, is just a resumed text of what was posted on Ultra Combo of the character’s past story. I know this will be more difficult, but I would really like a relationship menu where you can see who is allie, who is enemy and who is neutral to some characters, and also to be more like a pamphlet or a computer screen revealing the story and showing the parts that were not discovered as lost data or missing fragments. Something like that would be a better experiencie in my point of view.
I also really liked the way the world was corrupted little by little as you fail missions, and the menu of corruption for Gargos is very clear too.
In all, I really like the Shadow Lords experience. I was frustrated sometimes due to the difficult of the Godlike level but I really enjoyed everything. Expecting to play more of them on the week and see what is going to change in the final product.
Thanks for reading this long post.