When it was released on the XBox Live Arcade last summer, critics all across the video game land were jerkin' their gherkin over Epic Games and ChAIR's new Shadow Complex game. The game represented a classic, retro return to the "Metroidvania" style of gameplay. It was a 2D sidescroller where you got various items and weapons that would open up doorways in a huge... complex. ChAIR has created a game that feels like the games of our youth, but the more I played it, the more hollow I felt, and ultimately it amounts to a disappointment. A well intentioned disappointment, but a disappointment nonetheless.

Shadow Complex has got to be the first video game that inspired a novel that wound up appearing several years before the game did. When developer ChAIR approached acclaimed author/homophobe/treason advocate Orson Scott Card to collaborate on a video game (several ChAIR guys worked with him on the infamous Majesco PC/XBox bomb Advent Rising), he was sufficiently inspired by the collaboration to write Empire, which was released in 2006. Empire depicts an attempted coup by a bunch of left-wing revolutionaries (backed by a thinly veiled George Soros analogue) to take over America with their own private army, as a reparation for the 2000 and 2004 elections. At the same time a Homeland Security official finds his "worst case scenario" theory for a presidential assassination has been implemented, and a military coup may be imminent. The book was well recieved (though not quite as critically acclaimed as Card's earlier works), and a sequel, Hidden Empire , was released this past December. Card actually doesn't own the Empire IP, but operates under license from ChAIR.

The story's setup is simple. Following a vague prologue where the Vice President is assassinated while trying to escape strange armored soldiers in Washington DC, the action cuts to the Pacific Northwest and ex-military man Jason Flemming (Nolan North) and his new girlfriend Claire (Eliza Jane Schneider). Claire and Jason are backpacking when they come across a cave. While exploring, Claire is taken away by men wearing the same armor as the guys who attacked the Vice President. Turns out Jason and Claire have stumbled upon the secret base of the Progressive Restoration, the villains of Empire. Now Jason has to rescue Claire somewhere within the depths of the techno-military monster that is the... SHADOW COMPLEX.

Like Samus Aran and Alucard before him, Jason starts out with nothing, in this case a 9mm and a flashlight. The further he bores his way into the base, the more weapons and pieces of armor and items he can find. The map of Shadow Complex is set up as a gigantic grid not dissimilar to the map of Symphony of the Night. Once a player gets a piece of the world map, they can look at it and spot places to get items. As Jason fights his way through the base from one story checkpoint to the next, he can blow out walls and check out secret rooms to get more goodies. The game doesn't have key cards to open locked doors, but a color coded weapons system. Jason shines his flashlight on a door, boulder, or other item, and the color that is displayed means it can be destroyed by the corresponding weapon, ie guns destroy orange blockages, grenades destroy green boulders, foam messes up locked purple automatic doors. There's a lot of items to acquire, and completionists will have a field day. There's even an interesting Achievement that asks you to go through the game with only 13% of the items, the minimum required to complete the game.

Shadow Complex is on a 2.5 D plane. Jason's movements are restricted from left to right along the game board (which gets a little irritating when you have to jump up to areas that are clearly connected by stairs in the background), while enemies attack not just from the front and back, but from the background. This takes a moment to get used to but it's a nice way to spice up the gameplay. Actual gameplay is run and gun: Jason shoots everything in sight, with an occasional assist from the doormaking weapons. There's plenty of classical platforming involved, and the more pieces of armor Jason acquires, the further he can explore the nooks and crannies of the base. Again, like Metroid and Symphony of the Night, oftentimes you'll see a doorway or an area that's just oh so completely out of reach. It can be very satisfying to finally open up an area or get an item that you'd run by so many times.

But that satisfaction doesn't quite add up to a good game. Despite all the elements in place for the kind of game I used to love playing the further I got into Shadow Complex the more exasperated I became with it. I think part of the problem, and it's a big one, is that the Progressive Restoration base is crippled by a lack of visual imagination. One of the great things about "Metroidvania" gameplay is how every time you would open up a new area of the world to explore, that usually looked completely different from what came before. Most of the time, when you blow out a wall to go to another room in Shadow Complex, you're treated to another generic factory or comm room or storage area or mech hangar or walkway filled with soldiers all wearing the same uniforms. Occasionally there will be an underwater area or an underground area, but it wasn't enough to hold my interest. Enemy variety is similarly disappointing: there are very few types of standard enemy.

Those enemies are also fairly easy to beat. On the standard difficulty, Shadow Complex is a cakewalk. There are a few challenging platforming spots, but combat is a simplistic breeze. Sometimes strategy with the varied weapons is required to take down one of the many mech bosses Jason encounters. Most of the enemies, however, are easy taken out with a head shot or a simple melee combo when you walk right up to them (What is with these games and their instant kill melees?). Head shotting is easy to get the hang of, so there's very little to worry about. The game's variety of weapons aren't necessary to actual combat, just managing your way through the base. The final battle is somewhat creative, but also frustrating because the game cheats by not explaining what's going on, which makes a tense faceoff also a tedious case of trial and error. When the game ended, I felt really unfulfilled; it feels less like a full game and more like the first act.

Then there's the story. It took me a while to try Shadow Complex because of my personal disagreements with Mr. Card's politics (have the same issue with the Tom Clancy and Modern Warfare games). It turns out I needn't have worried, since ChAIR has made the game apolitical. From what I can tell, this isn't meant to be a dodge; ChAIR head Donald Mustard wanted  to make the story as minimal as possible, so as not to contradict any story points in Empire. If you're looking for any political demons in Shadow Complex you won't find them: the Progressive Restoration is as generic as the Marvel Comics bad guys HYDRA. It's never discussed why, how, or who is behind the base Jason and Claire find; only that they're bad, and they want to lead America into a new imperial age (the timeline of the game is paralell to the attack on DC in the novel). Even though I don't like Card's views, I still felt like, well, SOMETHING other than "Get the girl back" could have been used to enrich the game's plot, because what I've read of the novel seems quite interesting from an objective point of view.

Novelist/comics scribe Peter David, who I've long been a fan of, brings none of his trademark wit or zippy plotting to the game's script. Jason is generic as they come: there's a goofy flashback scene where he tells his father that he doesn't want to be a soldier because he doesn't want to be a killer, and his father admonishes him that he'll one day find something worth fighting for. I kept waiting for this flashback to pay off somehow, since they go out of their way to not show the elder Flemming's face, but it never did. North plays Jason like a whiny version of his Nathan Drake, and he comes off as unlikable sometimes. And developers, seriously, you have GOT to stop designing every character North plays to look like Drake. Jason has a five o' clock shadow, and wears practically the same clothes as Drake. Seriously, folks, this is getting out of hand. There's also a twist involving the nature of Claire and Jason's relationship that's meant to come off as a way of changing how we looked at the events of the story (such as they were) but instead comes off as completely ridiculous.

Despite the unimaginative design, the sound and visuals of Shadow Complex are pretty darn good for an XBox LIVE arcade title. The environments are nicely detailed and the animation is smooth and pleasing to the eye. The music in minimal, but the effects are excellent. North and Schneider do their usual professional jobs. It's clear that no expense was spared.

Speaking of expenses, in 2003, Majesco released a little known game called Blowout. You can find Blowout on Games on Demand (For the same price as Shadow Complex). An Aliens-style take on the "Metroidvania" style, it was thig game, and not Mustard's stated inspriation Super Metroid, I was most reminded of while playing Shadow Complex. Once the shock of 2D sidescrolling nostalgia wore off, the visuals looked unimaginative and the run and gun gameplay is perfunctory. Shadow Complex is a much better playing game, but it's got the same problem in that it looks too much to the past for inspiration instead of mixing things with the present. It's not that I don't like the retro style of the game, it's that it's not a very memorable experience, and I think ChAIR's understandable dedication to minimalism had something to do with that. At one point I realized all those cool weapons really amounted to different colored key cards; that's something that never happened when I played Super Metroid. I tip my hat to ChAIR for this, but i had the same reaction to it I had to the new Friday The 13th: yeah, it's got the boobs, the gore, the hockey mask, all I could ask for- it's just not very fun.