Shadow Complex/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Nightmare Fuel: After flooding a part of the base, you will have to traverse through it multiple times, especially if you're going for 100% Completion. While you traverse the flooded corridors to tune of a sad piano piece, you hear the complex creaking, and are treated to the sight of the numerous corpses of those you inadvertently killed. Even worse is the realization that the rooms you flooded included the cafeteria, where you just saw dozens of mooks sitting down for lunch, and that many of them may very well have been Punch Clock Villains.
  • Awesome Music: Though the music is fairly infrequent, usually only playing during battles or plot scenes, it succeeds in producing an eerie and suspenseful atmosphere. Especially the title screen music.
  • Catharsis Factor: Meleeing human soldiers and punting Bomba robots, especially after you get the Omega Armor.
  • Demonic Spiders: The "Storm Shadow ninjas" are stupidly difficult to target, take a stupidly large amount of damage, and deal even more stupidly large damage.
  • Game Breaker: Many examples. Most are only relevant at extreme lategame - getting the Fusion Helmet, which requires all of the passcodes, infinite subweapons, which requires you to be level 30/40/50 or to find all the foam/missile/grenade packs...
  • Rooting for the Empire: Depending on how much one knows about the background of the story, some players might find themselves doing this out of Values Dissonance (depending on socio-political inclination), or perhaps because Evil Is Cool (they do have all the nice Powered Armor and Spider Tanks after all.)
  • Scrappy Mechanic: The ability to shoot at enemies in the background sometimes means that Jason will fire into walls or aim at background targets first rather than those right in front of him, causing you to either blow your attempts at being stealthy or waste ammo (and time reloading.)
  • So Cool Its Awesome: The general critical and gamer consensus could be summarized as a loud, girlish Squee.
  • The Untwist: A Genre Savvy player will realize that Claire really is a spy after the third cutscene.