2 Minute Video Review → https://youtu.be/Kb8WkIEpZrg

Shadow Uprising is a post apocalyptic stealth game.

It’s a single-player game with 9 levels. Each level is patrolled by robot ninjas and the goal is to make it to the end of the level without dying, you don’t have to kill every enemy.

There’s a variety of stealth tools at your disposal. Crouching low to the ground will make less noise and the guards won’t notice you as quickly.

You can climb on any surface with your hands.

You have a grappling hook to move quickly vertically or horizontally.

If you throw a ninja star or fire an arrow away from you, it’ll draw the guards to that spot so you can move past them or quickly assassinate them from behind.

Throughout each level you’ll find special stealth areas with outlines. Going to those spots will make you hidden and allow you to see all the guards, even through walls.

Before each level you can customize your loadout. At the beginning of the game you’ll only have a few weapons, but you can unlock more if you find secrets in the levels.

The ambience and overall mood reminded me of the old Perfect Dark game on N64. I mean that in a good way as it has a retro feel to it, which I enjoyed.

I view this as a mix between stealth and puzzle. Trying to remain unseen, and quietly kill the guards is what this game is all about. It’s not about ninja combat per se, it’s about sneaking around.

There’s 9 levels, and you can beat it in about 3 hours. So for $20 it’s a decent value. And there’s replay-ability if you want to find all the secrets and weapons.

It’s not as polished as say, Budget Cuts. But it’s also not as expensive. Check it out for a pseudo retro stealth game.

Climb on walls like spiderman, be stealthy like Tenchu, Shadow Uprising is a one of a kind VR game where you have to make your way through alleys with patrolling guards & a sword, bow & shurikens.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d96jQoSETsw

Shadow Uprising is a casual-friendly but still enjoyable addition to the VR stealth genre with a "Sly Cooper 1 but cyber Japan" aesthetic and a very fun twist on movement.


The Good:

1. Movement -- The Spiderman-like dual wrist grapples and the climbing gloves make moving around the world just plain fun. Scramble up a wall and then go hand over hand underneath the edge of the roof? Sure. Fire both grapples to suspend yourself above an unsuspecting guard you're about to drop down on and murder? Go for it. How about grapple and pull yourself to behead a guard as you swoop past? Gets a malicious laugh out of me every time I pull it off. The icing on the cake is the fact that the controls are so intuitive that doing maneuvers like this is strictly a matter of player creativity and reflexes, not overcoming janky inputs.

2. Controls/Customizability -- The game's control scheme beyond the grappling/climbing stuff mentioned above is overall just as fluid. Weapons are stored in 4 different hotspot virtual holsters on your body (and you can freely customize what's stored in each), and are retrieved with a simple gesture. Quick and easy, and lets you focus on what you're trying to do. Might seem a little odd to spend the wordcount bringing this up, but it's still annoyingly common to hit bizarre, awkward control schemes in VR games, especially when using controllers that didn't exist when a given game launched.

On a similar note, there's a decent variety of control/comfort options in the game. For users who need snap turning to play comfortably, be advised that while Shadow Uprising doesn't have the standard instantaneous snapping, it does have the ability to customize how fast it snaps you by a given angle, and it can be pushed fast enough to be nearly instant.

3. UI -- Did you think it was immersive and convenient having your health/ammo/etc on a display on the back of your hand in Half-Life: Alyx? Shadow Uprising did it in 2018. Nice!

4. Maps -- While the mapping in this game isn't as intricate as what you'll find in the Budget Cuts series, they're still enjoyable, and you can usually find some alternate paths through parts of them so you can choose how to approach larger concentrations of guards. You'll also want to watch for the hidden bits of lore, and most importantly, the new weapons -- there's no buying weapons for tokens or getting them for free as the game progresses, you'll *need* to hunt them down. Some are very well hidden, especially the bow that grants bullet time.

5. Performance -- Zero performance issues at 120hz on the Index. No bizarre glitches from running faster than the 90hz that was standard in 2018.

6. Rain -- There's rain in many levels! It's weirdly immersive in VR. I like it.


The Bad:

1. Length -- It's not terribly long, especially if you're not interested in replaying levels to hunt for weapons or missing lore. Took me about 3 hours to get to the end boss on my first fairly thorough but not completionist playthrough. Note that I said "get to", not beat. That leads me to my next point...

2. Endboss Difficulty -- Did someone order a massive difficulty spike? No? Too bad, you get one anyway. It's a very cool encounter that I don't want to spoil, but it could really stand for a rebalance, maybe slow down the boss's firing speed or narrow its attack area a bit. As it is now, it virtually necessitates finding and using the bullet time bow to beat, and that seems to be one of the hardest weapons to find. On a more general note, it pretty much forces a purely ranged approach, and that's a disappointing and abrupt narrowing of playstyle freedom compared to the rest of the game.

3. AI -- The AI's pretty simple and forgiving. The bots in Budget Cuts are quite a bit more skilled and aggressive than these. On the other hand, if you're new to the genre or in the mood for something more laid-back, it might be a good fit. Game's still fun though -- the challenge comes more from working through the enemies and environment like a puzzle, rather than tense games of cat and mouse or Metal Gear Solid-style pitched combat.


The Ugly:

1. Knuckles Controller Issues -- This game came out well before the Index Controllers were a thing, and it shows on occasion. Your empty hands are somewhat misaligned as they were oriented for the old Vive wands. This one's not too bad, as they snap into the correct orientation any time you grab the wall or fire a grapple. The sword/dagger generally orient ok as well.

The ranged weapons though... different story. The shuriken, kunai, and bow are badly misaligned. The bow can be worked around -- the arrow is correctly aligned, it's the bow itself that's wrong. So if you can ignore that distraction, you can still aim normally. The throwing weapons are a mess though. I had to resort to an odd wrist flick to reliably use them with the Knuckles, but it can be done.


Nerd Stuff:

Tested on a Valve Index with Knuckles controllers at 120hz.



Final Thoughts:

If you're a fan of stealth games, I'd say Shadow Uprising is worth picking up, even if it's a bit on the simple side. $20 might be a little high in 2020 given it's competition in the much more ambitious Budget Cuts 1/2, but if you see it on sale and are in the mood for an afternoon or two of Spiderman ninja stealth, go for it. Fingers crossed that someday this developer follows up with another game that iterates on the interesting movement mechanics, now that they've got some VR development experience under their belts.

Has a nice Tenchu vibe to it.

I love the art style, game-play and concept... but sadly for me the movement made me feel sick nearly instantly, even when moving relative to the headset.

I feel like if the grappling hook had a teleport or comfort mode this could be alleviated somewhat, however the sliding feeling that happens when you climb over the top of a wall also made me queasy.

I wish steam would led me review this without a recommended yes/no, as I would definitely recommend this... for someone who doesn't suffer from motion sickness.

for me it's sadly a hard no.

The spider-man-esque movement and assassinations were really cool, so if you don't have a problem with motion sickness go for it.

Index controls seem to be completely borked. I cannot move while in a mission. I'm going to try to get support before I refund this, but as far as I can tell there's no longer any comms from the Dev team since 2018.

I was really looking forward to this one, so I hope it doesn't come to that.

-EDIT-
After attempting to find ways to reach out to the company and talking with community members, there's still no way for me to play because the controls just don't work.

I've requested a refund, though I wish more that the company would have made it easier to reach out when there's issues.

You can view my review & gameplay here: https://youtu.be/heQdfokXtFI

Would I have recommended this game at the normal retail price of $19.99 USD? Hell no. This honestly isn't a very good game. However, it's currently on sale 90% during the Steam Summer Sale 2020 and at that price, I can recommend it. Just beware the enemy AI is very dumb and this game lacks overall polish.

It's running on the Unity Engine. I didn't experience any major issues. The only minor bug I experienced was where I could suddenly see through a barrier, but that was only temporary. The game ran smoothly for the most part. You have full locomotion and smooth or snap turning.

You can choose your load out for each level for weapons you have unlocked (by finding them secretly hidden). You can sneak by enemies or kill them all. Your weapons include a sword, bow & arrow, shuriken, kunai, dagger, etc. There are locations in the map where you can hide or you can just use natural barriers to get out of the line of sight of patrolling enemies.

There are 9 total levels. It should take most people 2-3 hours to beat the game. There isn't much challenge in this game until you get to the final boss. I started off killing every single enemy in this game, but I found that style of gameplay to be boring as the enemy AI was just too dumb. Eventually I decided to try to just hide & also web sling myself across the map as fast as possible, utilizing all the different hidden spots and barriers to get out of the line of sight of enemies. That was more fun.

Unfortunately, as mentioned, since enemy AI is bad, the stealth part of this game just isn't very interesting. You can easily kill all the enemies (until you get to the boss). The levels in between the start of the game and the end of the game just ended up feeling like a slog due to the novelty of the web sling and surprise one-hit kill dagger or sword attack (my favorite combo) wearing off.

There just isn't interesting level design or new interesting mechanics introduced to this game. This game just lacks depth, it never improves from the first 2-3 levels you play. Other than a drone with a spotlight, I'm not sure I noticed any differences between the enemies on the way to the boss. There was just more of them as you went along.

Sale Price Rating 6/10. Not bad for $2 USD, however, I'd be pretty upset if I had spent $20 USD on this.

SO for starters, this game is pretty damned good, it made me think of a crossover between XIII and Metal Gear Solid with some robotic samuraii thrown in for good measure. The game play is fun and interesting. All the sneaking around. Zipping from place to place either avoiding the drones or luring them into a trap. Was definitely a good time.

A few bugs found here and there but nothing super game breaking. On a rare (vewry rare) ocassion the drones could see right through hiding spots and sometimes when climbing ladders it would trow you onto the other side of it requiring you to be super precise but other than that there's not a whoile lot wrong with this game.

The only thing that really let it down for me, not that it will stop me playing it again by any means, is the bow. Early game it's handy to have as a noise maker but I just wish it would do a little more damage to drones especially when you line up the perfect headshot and see it only do 15 or 20 damage to an enemy. And the only other thing which is more of a slight annoying really is when you lure a enemy into a trap they can instantly tuirn on you and kill you flat before you've even had a change to stab them with the sword.

Honestly though, with only those two minor annoyances, it's a pretty fun game, you work up a sweat cause it is a bit physicle, its an interesting story with some fun hidden secrets to find that really make the story unfold.

Another one of those games where joystick movement just doesn't work
can't play the game without moving

a Great Deal during the steam summer sale and way to pass the time during covid-19. If there was a way to add more levels it would be even better but with the 9 included definitely enough for the $$.