It’s not a usual thing to see games with this level of quality. Absolutely unavoidable if you want to blow your head off
Did you ever play a first-person shooter where one of the missions directed you to find a lost cat? Then, you must play Shogo, perhaps the best and most funny shooter I ever played. It was the first game I played this February, when I bought a new computer and discarded my old Pentium-100; and believe me if I tell you that it really was the greatest way to inaugurate a new computer. It seems as if every little part of the game was designed with such effort and care that I wasn’t unable to find anything that was wrong or weak, and when I finished the game on both endings I was so pleased with it and wanted so much more that I played it again right from the start.
Before I start telling you something about the game, let me state that Shogo is meant for anime fans. As a matter of fact, Shogo was designed from script to artwork as if it just were a conversion of any Japanese anime into a PC shooter. So, if you don’t like anime at all, you should stay away from Shogo; or give it a try with that on mind.
The plot, as usual on animes, is so complex that you must read it in the game’s documentation before playing it. There’s a kind of galactic war being carried on a planet very far from Earth called Cronus. The cause of the war is an alien chemical called kato, some kind of organic vestige that apparently is alive in some sense. What makes kato so important is not only the possibility of being used as a heavily damaging caloric weapon, but instead the property of allowing speeds greater than light if used like fuel. There are three forces confronting themselves for the control of kato: The UCA, which is the Terran corporation you serve; the CMC, formerly the base of operations of the UCA on Cronus but later it declared its independence from the UCA; and the Fallen, some kind of native guerrilla commanded by a mysterious and unknown leader called Gabriel. You incarnate Sanjuro, a guy who lost his girlfriend and his brother on the war and who is being put on probation for being considered responsible of their deaths.
This is only the previous information you need to know before launching Shogo, since the game starts from the point where the “Plot” section of the manual ends. When Shogo starts, the war has gone very long and it became a real pain in the ass for the UCA; so, Admiral Akkaraju decides to play his best card: to send a lonely guy with the order of infiltrating into the Fallen to kill Gabriel. Of course, this lonely guy is Sanjuro. You.
From then on, the story unfolds, develops and twists itself, following a very cleverly written script. Suddenly, you lose the notion that you are playing a game and start feeling that you are playing the lead role on a movie or a book. The plot is so interesting and so well integrated into the game, that when you reach the last level you will not notice that you just completed more than 40 levels to get there. As a matter of fact, the script had enough stamina to make Shogo a game with 60 or 70 levels and not only 40; and you notice that on the last levels, when plot threads tend to end and resolve themselves in a very abrupt way. I tell it again: finishing Shogo lets you with such a thirst for something more that probably you will start the game anew, as I did. No, the fact that Shogo has two possible endings doesn’t fix the thirst.
Plot is not the only strong issue of Shogo. About the graphics, Shogo looks even way better than Unreal, period. And it is damn fast. I played it on 1024x768, with every possible texture, shadow, light, blur and effect at maximum levels, and it flew. Of course, it was a feast to the eyes. Shoot a laser, and the beam will light walls along its way. Destroy a car, and you will witness an explosion, smoke and dust trails, and pieces of debris and shrapnel flying everywhere and incrusting themselves onto the walls. Try to walk over people when you’re on board of your 30-feet-tall mecha, and see what happens. More than a time, I stopped in the middle of a mission, just to take a screenshot of the situation I was in, without caring if the enemy killed me or not.
About the music, it is so good that I downloaded it on MP3 format from the Monolith server and I use to listen to it from time to time. Yes, it is that good. The soundtrack has only seven tracks, but the computer plays them as if it were a DJ: it cuts selected sections of forty seconds from every track, pastes them, and plays them. You will believe that the soundtrack has a lot of songs; but no, they are only seven, and they are damn good. Sound effects are excellent, and the voice acting is very consistent and well performed.
About the level design, it’s the level design which is meant to be the support for the development of the plot, and not conversely. Levels do not start and finish: they evolve; and they are something to be lived and experienced, not just a list of objectives that must be completed in order to get a new list of objectives. Apart from the now standard changes of objectives in the middle of a mission, the levels are full of life. Climb three sets of stairs with the fat Hank Johnson, and he will tell you to stop some time to rest because he went out of breath. Make some noise, and some enemy that was located at the other extreme of a corridor will run to see what happens. To avoid monotony, some sections of Shogo must be completed with you maneuvering a mecha, while other must be completed on foot. And believe me, the levels that you play grounded make Counterstrike to seem silly, while the mecha levels will compel you to throw Mechwarrior to your trash bin. I have never felt again 30 feet of height as really being 30 feet of height, as in Shogo.
To sum up, this is not a game but a piece of art, period. It has more than everything to kick butt, even on present times. The only negative remarks are the abruptness of both endings, and that anime haters will feel like a toad from a different pool with Shogo. And that even the straight 10 that I’m giving to Shogo feels like an insufficient score. It’s not a usual thing to see games with this level of quality, and even less usual to see games that want so feverishly to involve us into a hellishly good story. If I would have to synthesize everything I said about Shogo into only one word, I should say: unavoidable.