Summary
Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remasteredis a thoroughly unique adventure, largely due to the influence of its writer, Suda51. It combines tight third-person shooting with an array of eccentric characters to create an experience you won’t soon forget. However, the game is rather short, and you can blaze through it in a few sittings.
As you wrap the campaign up, you may find yourself wishing you could play more. Thankfully, Shadows of the Damned shares a lot of design principles and aesthetic choices with other titles. If you loved your trip to hell, we’d recommend you check out these games next.
If you’re looking to shoot up more ghouls, The House of the Dead is a great choice. Originally launched in 1997, The House of the Dead was a light gun arcade game where you used prop firearms to kill zombies in first-person. When the arcade market began to die out, the series migrated to consoles, where it maintained the same gameplay structure but saw less cultural relevance.
The first game in the series was remade and launched in 2022 on the Nintendo Switch, but later came to other systems as well. If you’re looking for the most arcade-accurate way to play though, the Switch version is your best bet, with the gyro-aiming built into the Joy-Con able to provide a reasonable facsimile of the light gun experience.
Suda51 has had a long and storied career, during which he’s made games in a wide variety of genres, and Lollipop Chainsaw is his take on the beat-‘em-up. You play as Juliet, a high school cheerleader who must defend her town from zombies with her trusty chainsaw. Its remaster, RePop, has made its way to modern hardware, making it much more accessible as it was previously stranded on seventh-gen consoles.
The game is also notable for its writing staff, which includes James Gunn. While he is now incredibly well known for his superhero films, Lollipop Chainsaw launched before his brush with fame. It’s interesting to experience one of his earlier projects, especially one that is unshackled from established mythology or restrictive age ratings.
Suda wasn’t the only big name attached to Shadows of the Damned, with fellow industry legend Shinji Mikami also lending his talents to the project. Mikami is best known for his work on the Resident Evil series, and innovating contemporary third-person shooting in 2005’s Resident Evil 4.Five years later, he launched another shooterknown as Vanquish.
Developed by PlatinumGames, a studio known for stylish action, Vanquish was significantly more kinetic than Mikami’s previous work in the genre. The game features a science fiction setting, where you control Sam Gideon, a soldier with an armored suit that allows him to perform acrobatic maneuvers like power-sliding. Additionally,you gain the ability to slow time, letting you pick enemies off with pinpoint precision.
Devil May Cry lets players step into the shoes of Dante,another demon hunterhellbent on protecting humanity from the underworld. Despite a similar main character to Shadows of the Damned, its gameplay is quite different, swapping behind-the-back shooting for hack-and-slashing with sword and other weapons.
The first entry in the long-running series sees Dante traveling to an abandoned castle in an attempt to kill the demon emperor Mundus. Along the way, you’ll cross blades with many creatures of the underworld, and discover shocking revelations about his family. Devil May Cry is considered by many to be a cornerstone of the character action subgenre, and there are many more series entries to play if the first one hooks you.
Shinji Mikami’s most famous and influential video game is without a doubt Resident Evil 4, but he didn’t double down on his survival horror success after it launched. Instead,he chose to pursue projects in other genres, such as beat-‘em-ups and shooters (see 2006’s God Hand and 2010’s Vanquish). Finally, in 2014, he returned to his RE roots with The Evil Within.
The Evil Within adopts the same gameplay structure as Mikami’s seminal classic, but places it in a different setting. Detective Sebastian Castellanos has to fight for his life after being placed in the mind of deranged serial killer Ruvik. For fans looking for more classic survival horror shooting, this is a must-play.
It’s immediately clear when starting Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster that the developers took a lot of inspiration from classic films like George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. You play as Frank West, a photojournalist who travels to the Willamette Parkview Mall in order to investigate a series of violent disturbances. After arriving, you become trapped, and must survive the zombie hordes until backup arrives.
Despite the dire circumstances, the game has a very campy tone. You’ll beable to improvise weapons, wear bizarre outfits, and mess with the undead as you try and rescue any survivors. Dead Rising isn’t trying to go for horror, and it could be a great way to introduce more sensitive gamers to the zombie subgenre.
Despite having industry credits dating back to the early 1990s, Suda51 didn’t burst into the gaming mainstream until the mid 2000s. He’s best known for the No More Heroes series, which debuted on the Nintendo Wii. You take control of Travis Touchdown, a wannabe badass who tries to become the world’s top ranked assassin.
Gameplay is largely focused on hack-and-slash combat, cutting down the killers ranked above you and their armies of henchmen. There are also intervening periods where you need to perform chores and activities in the hub world to afford your next mission, like collecting coconuts and mowing lawns. Thisdissonance between hyper-violence and everyday mundanityhelps contribute to the game’s charm, which many fans have fallen in love with.
If you like the roguelike genre, you’ve probably heard of Hades. The 2020 Game of the Year finalist took the world by storm upon its full launch, with players dumping hundreds of hours into its dungeon-crawling gameplay. It proved so successful that Supergiant started development on Hades 2, the studio’s first sequel.
You play as Zagreus, the son of Hades. The goal is to leave the underworld and reunite with your mother, Persephone, who has previously escaped, and learn more about why she left. As you progress further, you will collect more upgrades and abilities, making your future runs even easier. Even after you complete the story, you may continue carving through the game’s dungeons, letting you play forever.
2016’s Doom was met with quite a bit of trepidation before launch; the series hadn’t had a mainline title since 2004’s Doom 3, which itself came under fire for straying too far from what made the originals great. Thankfully, id Software took a back to basics approach and crafted one of the best shooters of the decade.
Doom’s single-player offering is immaculate, with solid gunplay and well-designed levels. The designers focused on the idea of ‘combat chess’ with each demon fulfilling a specific purpose in the gameplay sandbox. This resulted in one of the greatest FPS campaigns of all time, largely thanks to the focus on arcadey fun, while the rest of the industry was pushing for realism and immersion.
If you’re looking for the best third-person shooters of all time, your search must include Resident Evil 4. Shinji Mikami’s masterpiece debuted in 2005, and was thenremade in 2023. The plot follows United States special agent Leon Kennedy as he traverses the Spanish countryside looking for the president’s daughter, who has been kidnapped by a cult known as Los Iluminados.
The original game is a seminal classic, but we recommend the remake due to its updated controls; being able to shoot while moving and perform parries sits better with newer gamers than tank movement. RE4 is also a great place to jump into the series, since it’s a relatively self-contained story that doesn’t require any lore dumps. If you haven’t experienced Leon’s adventure before, you’re missing out on a phenomenally designed game.
