Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered review for PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, Xbox

It’s really tempting to say that a game like Shadows of the Damned hasn’t aged all that well. I mean, it’s a collaboration between Suda51 (of No More Heroes fame) and Shinji Mikami (best known for directing the first installments of both Resident Evil and Dino Crisis) that at times feels like one very long penis joke (the joke being the thing that’s very long, not the – you know, nevermind). I understand why some people might look at the game and say something like this could never get made today, and that you have to go in expecting a game that came out near the tail end of the PS360 era, with all the caveats that entails.

The thing is, I remember playing this game way back when it first came out on PS3, and I’m pretty sure that the criticisms you’d hear of Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered today aren’t that different from what people said about the game back in 2011. We’re not talking about a revered classic by any stretch of the imagination. It’s not like people didn’t recognize thirteen years ago that the game was hugely immature and a little clunky – anyone saying otherwise is just engaging in revisionist history.

Unfortunately, because this is largely the same game – just with a fresh coat of paint – the criticisms that were applied to Shadows of the Damned back then still apply to this Hella Remastered version. In particular, the gameplay leaves a lot to be desired. The tank controls that hindered the game a decade ago feel positively ancient here, particularly because this is such a shooting-heavy game; I’m sure they might appeal to anyone who pines for PS1-era controls in shooters, but without that nostalgia, it just feels awkward. Given that so much of Shadows of the Damned is built around the hero, Garcia Hotspur, firing off his guns at hordes of undead enemies, you can see why slowly rotating around feels like a weird design choice. While I could see someone arguing that it adds a bit of tension to have Garcia unable to just whip out his Johnson – that’d be his demon/gun, which also transforms into the Boner, the Big Boner, and the Hotboner, and did I mention this game is one long penis joke? – and blast away at the undead, it feels at odds with the tone of the game.

As for that tone…it’s undeniably juvenile. Everything about Shadows of the Damned feels like it was designed to either appeal to you (if you have the sense of humour of a 13-year-old boy) or turn you off entirely. On top of the single entendres and innuendos about all things phallic, you have Hotspur’s dead girlfriend prancing around in skimpy negligee as battles through Hell to win her back, a pooping eyeball (called One-Eyed William, if you need another penis reference) that acts as a save point, and all the blood and gore you could ever want in a game.

I’d be lying, though, if I didn’t say that I found the game fun.

I mean, is it crude? Absolutely. And I can totally understand how it could be offensive, too. But at the same time, there’s something undeniably gleeful about it all. Shadows of the Damned never slows down for a moment (except, I guess, when you’re turning Diego around to aim at demons), and never bothers with things like introspection or complexity: it’s just a dumb power fantasy. But it never pretends for a moment to be anything more than that. Given how self-serious so many games are, it’s fun to play something that’s so unabashedly stupid.

That’s not to say that Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered isn’t without its problems. But again, they’re not new problems – pretty much everything that was bad about the game 13 years ago still stands. But everything good about the game is still just as good in 2024 as it was in 2011, which means that, as remasters go, this one has probably achieved exactly what it set out to do.

Grasshopper Manufacture provided us with a Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered PC code for review purposes.