As someone who never spent a dime on Shadow Fight 2, I must have spent at least 100 hours on it. While the farming was pretty bad later on, the game wasn't P2W at all and I had no problems completing content without payed gear. Even if it said impossible on the difficulty meter, I could usually overtake that "impossible" challenge. Hell, that's how I got Hermit's swords early as hell.
shadow fight 2 mod complete
But... Shadow Fight 3 is complete and utter trash. So far. I'm still playing it, and I'm going to see if it gets better, but I honestly doubt it will. This game does ONE SINGLE THING better than SF2, and I'll go over that now.
The good:
The combat system is amazing and it feels much more satisfying than SF2's, I haven't yet encountered a weapon that's not the twin small axes (the shit weapons from SF2 returned! YAY!) that have significant problems dealing with every single other weapon type. They have their strengths and combat speed is much faster, and the addition of special moves early on make the game have more depth and it feels much better. I love using shadow abilities, they feel powerful and satisfying to use.
The Bad:
While if the game wasn't like it is right now, I would put this point in good. But however, the devs decided to go the "farm a hell ton or you suck" route. The AI is much better, making for closer fights when the mode is "Normal" and the match is balanced. However, this never happens regularly. The game has made a new way of fucking you completely over. Hard mode isn't hard, it's equivalent to SF2's Very Hard and sometimes even Impossible. Enemies at this level take next to no damage and can sometimes two shot you, and they shock you more than some guy who spent his momma's wallet to steamroll in SF2. As said, I would gladly welcome better AI if the artificial difficulty wan't through the stratosphere. It's just too much, and that brings me to the disgusting.
The Disgusting:
Holy microtransactions, Batman! You know how much farming you needed to do in SF2? Yeah? Well if you did then you'll hate it here! Now you need to farm EVEN MORE. Upgrading weapons is a chore since you can no longer do it with gold, but you need to get shadow energy won from packs. And when I mean shadow energy won from packs, I mean that it's RANDOM that you'll get ANY AT ALL. I went through 30 duels with only getting 4 Shadow Energy from a pack, which of course allowed me to upgrade a single piece of armor. Woo! Now it costs 2x that amount to upgrade! SO FUN!
Loot boxes in this game are the worst aspect of it by far. They weren't in SF2, we didn't need them in here. You can either buy a booster pack for 1000 gold which is accumulated after about 10-20 solid minutes of braindead unfun fighting the AI, and then you get some terrible reward like an upgrade for your worst weapon, armor, or helmet. The second lootbox is actually just a lootbox! They're gotten for free! This would be good if they didn't take THREE HOURS PLUS to open. Hell, rare boxes take EIGHT HOURS to open! EIGHT!. I rushed it with the little free gems they give you just to see what would be in it, and lo and behold I got JACK SHIT. This is by far the biggest problem with the game. I don't even think that shadow energy can drop from these chests, making then even worse.
You also have to go through this RNG bullshit to earn and level up COMBAT MOVES, I don't need to explain why this is complete and utter ass considering you literally had all of your weapon moves base unlocked in SF2 and that you got your hand to hand abilities by leveling up. Locking essential content behind RNG lootboxes is a stupid idea.
Now, this won't just be a salt post, I will actually discuss how to improve this game.
STEP 1: Make chests gained from duels open instantly.
- Since chests from duels are garbage, making them open instantly would make sense as it would actually be fair.
STEP 2:Add shadow energy to chests and increase their income from all sources
- This would fix the grinding problems. I know the devs need money but considering that they likely made so much money from SF2, the game shouldn't be this greedy.
STEP 3: Obviously, give the damn special moves back to the weapons innately, only have the equip-able items on weapons be perks that don't affect how many attacks you have at your disposal.
STEP 4: Allow us to buy some weapons directly, add tournament mode to the beginning of the game (have not progressed far enough to see if it's still in the game).
If anyone has any other suggestions, I'm all ears.
I don't suggest this android game, not at all.
