Shadow Warrior 2 Swords, guns and demon mayhem

You carry more than 70 weapons, from razor katana and crescent blades to ornate shotguns and heavy ordnance, and the game rewards picking the right one for the mess in front of you. The blade work is the heart of it: first-person swordplay where limbs and heads come off with precision strikes, and heavy guns blow holes clean through colossal beasts. Ammo runs out faster than demons do, so the katana stays your best friend. One moment you are spinning through a crowd of imps, the next you are unloading into something the size of a bus. It is loud, gory and hard to stop.

This is a looter shooter, so the demons drop more than limbs. Weapons, armor, amulets and arcane relics all come in different qualities, and you slot up to three stones into a weapon to boost its performance or add elemental effects like poison, fire or stun. Karma and armor level up Lo Wang himself, and side quests pay out skills and guns worth chasing. Not every find is a keeper, but with distinct perks across the arsenal, no single playthrough shows you everything. Higher difficulties change enemy resistances and spawns, which gives your builds somewhere to go.

Five years after Lo Wang shattered the alliance between his old boss and the shadow realm's gods, the world is a strange one: humans and demons live side by side, and Zilla's neon cyberpunk metropolis glows at the edge of corrupted wildlands. The breach between realms literally reshapes the terrain, so landscapes and paths are procedurally generated and familiar missions rarely play out the same way twice. You take jobs as a hired sword for the Yakuza, run missions and side quests, and move fast while doing it: dashes, double jumps, wall climbs and no fall damage.

The whole campaign works online with up to four players, and it changes the texture of the game. Solo it is a fast hack and slash shooter; with friends it becomes a typhoon of blades, bullets and elemental effects crashing through the same missions, everyone keeping their own customized armor, items and loot. Plans fall apart, someone charges in with a katana, someone else blows up the thing the first person was aiming at, and the jokes write themselves. It is a straightforward setup: join up, pick a mission, cause havoc together.