Shadow Man.. More like, "Bad? Oh, man!"

Here's a look at another bargain bin title for the N64. It's called Shadow Man, and it's loosely based on the comic book of the same name.

Shadow Man is the story of a guy who becomes some kind of creepy voodoo warrior. His mission is to retrieve a bunch of dark souls so the bad guy can't get a hold of them himself. Oh, and there's lots of creepy bayou undertones. And swearing. Oh, and zombie things that make same sound effect over and over again.

But before I rip this game to shreds, let's talk about the good things. Control-wise, it actually works very well. It is similar to Zelda games in that it's 3rd person and you can run, jump, and grap onto ledges. You also have a gun. That shoots some kind of soul-breaking beam.

The character animations are actually done fairly well. You can swing across ropes and edge along cliffsides. If you have your gun out when swimming, the character uses his only free hand. So it works quite well.

The actual graphics, however, are not so good, even for N64 times. They either tried too hard to make things look good or they didn't try hard enough. Either way, people are blocky and walls have pretty low-resolution textures. The main character looks like a wasp with that 10-inch waist of his.

Anyways, at first it seemed like a kind of dark, cool adventure. But it's very easy to get lost, which makes it very easy to lose interest. And very easy to stop having fun. And aren't games all about fun?! Yeah!!

As far as the actual platforming goes, it works quite well. It's easy enough to swim, jump, and run around. The one thing that I do hate is that if you touch lava, you instantly burst into flames and die. And then you have to start the level over. So, a guy who can control souls is a walking tinder box. Lovely.

In short, it's kind of a weird game, and one that would require quite a bit of patience to complete. Patience that I don't have at the moment. Besides, I paid like $2 for it, so I'm not real worried about finishing it. I got my $2 worth.

Pros:

• Nicely animated character models
• Good platforming controls
• Decent voice-acting

Cons:

• Easy to get lost
• A little too weird
• Instant lava death

This game has earned a Blatantly Biased: