Way back in 2016 I wrote about Shadowgrounds, a top-down horror shooter by Frozenbyte, the developers of the Trine franchise. I thought it was a neat little game for what it was, and while it wasn’t super unique, it was at least a bit of fun for a few hours. Towards the end of the article I wrote:
One day I’ll get around to the sequel, Shadowgrounds: Survivor, which might be more of the same, but I don’t see that as a bad thing.
Then I mostly forgot about it. The original Shadowgrounds was a fun little romp for what it was, and I guess I felt I needed some time before I jumped right in. It wasn’t until almost a decade later would I actually get around to playing it. It wasn’t quite worth the wait.
Developed again by Frozenbyte and published by Meridian4, Shadowgrounds: Survivor is basically a standalone expansion pack to the original game. This was released one year after the original Shadowgrounds, and since Frozenbyte wasn’t a super big developer at the time, this felt a bit more like a tech demo than anything resembling a sequel.
Taking place concurrently with events from the original game, you play as three characters: Luke “Marine” Giffords, a generic soldier; Bruno “Napalm” Lastmann, a Russian drunken soldier stereotype; and Isabel “Sniper” Larose, a cute goth assassin lady. During the story you switch between these characters as they all get a message from McTiernan, a scientist who is trying to help fix a base in New Atlantis to cull the impending alien threat.
Like its predecessor, Shadowgrounds: Survivor is a top down action game. Each character has a unique set of weapons they use and procure throughout their journey to kill the alien threat, which is the general gamut of pistols, assault rifles, rocket launchers, flamethrowers, and railguns.
All the major arsenal from Shadowgrounds reappears here, but this time locked to specific characters. Marine only gets a pistol to start, but eventually picks up the legally-distinct-from-Alien Pulse Rifle. Napalm starts with a flamethrower, natch, but can get a shotgun. Sniper naturally has a special handgun but later picks up a railgun. Each character also has grenades they can throw at any time, as well as a tactical dodge to avoid gunfire.
There are a few new things in Survivor: For one, you can now level up your character by killing aliens during play. Doing this unlocks new abilities for your weapons and eventually special abilities that can be activated by pressing Spacebar. Enemies drop upgrade parts like in the original game, which can be used to upgrade the character’s arsenal. Though, do be warned: Each character has their own progression system, you can’t hoard weapon upgrades and have them carry over once you switch players, those upgrades are locked away until you can play as that character again. Lord knows I had a few moments where I held onto upgrades, only to be forced to play as another character. Kinda sucks.
Finally, there’s a survival mode. It’s not really wave-based, but the game does stop to give you just aliens to kill so they drop rewards. There’s a few levels in the campaign that do the typical “hold the fort” objectives, but there’s also a standalone objective mode if you wanna try to beat your friends at it. It’s neat but not really something I’d play more than once.
The original Shadowgrounds used a somewhat wonky but reliable camera system, where using the mouse can move the camera to see around the area. That feature is still there in Survivor, but a new camera mode is added where the cursor for your weapons is now dynamic and requires you to move the cursor to the edges of the screen to rotate.
I assume this was done to make it easier to see targets, but at times it felt like my aim wasn’t really hitting targets as effectively as the old camera system was. Eventually I switched back and realized I was hitting things more efficiently, so this free camera mode was kind of a bust. Though, in its defense, the “twin stick dual aiming” system introduced by Robotron 2084 and Smash T.V. and popularized by Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved and Super Stardust HD wasn’t really considered the gold standard for top-down combat at the time, so I can at least give them points for trying something new.
This game supports PhysX, the physics system originally made by Ageia before Nvidia bought the brand. Boxes, barrels and other stuff can be moved and bounced around with ease, and I bet this was pretty damn cool for the time. Shadowgrounds: Survivor was released just at the tail end of the Phun with Physics phenomenon of the 2000s, so I’m not surprised it uses this, but not to any particularly cool use except to hide secrets. It’s at least neat to play a physics-heavy game on a modern system, just to see all the physics objects flop around the way it was meant to be played.
This can be an issue on modern systems where the game straight-up refuses to work properly without PhysX installed. I’d recommend downloading the PhysX Legacy software from Nvidia’s website, which can make these games properly function on modern machines. I’d recommend this even if you don’t have an Nvidia video card.
While this game is ostensibly “Shadowgrounds, but more of it,” it does feel incredibly lacking. There’s no interesting story or lore this time, no silly PDAs with jokes on them, very little communication between characters, this is strictly an action game at its core. Which is fine, the combat in Shadowgrounds was solid enough, but it does cheapen the experience somewhat. Even with three characters I couldn’t relate to any of them, and they hit all the generic stereotypes for characters in these games, which makes it even worse. I can’t say the protagonist in Shadowgrounds was amazing well-written, but I cared a bit more about his journey than I have with these yahoos.
Outside of that, there isn’t a whole lot else here. Our three heroes do meet with McTiernan, and have to work together to get things fixed. And by “work together,” I mean “select which soldier you wanna bring to this mission,” which is a neat feature but only becomes available at the final chapter. It would’ve been neat to just be able to choose whoever you wanted to play as through the whole campaign, and have the story play out that way. Just so there’s more incentive to replay.
Honestly, I’m disappointed. What got me interested in Shadowgrounds in the first place was being a fun, silly, yet entertaining top-down shooter romp. Shadowgrounds: Survivor is definitely More Of That, but it doesn’t work as well. Frozenbyte stripped the game’s mechanics to its absolute studs, and shows that when you focus on action, you make a game that’s kinda fun to play but ends up being absolutely forgettable. At times it really feels more like a tech demo for PhysX than an actual game, which is a bummer.
There’s a lot of ideas that could’ve been done to make this an outstanding followup, but either due to time or resources, they couldn’t. Shadowgrounds: Survivor is a game I’m going to play once and probably never come back to, whereas it’s been long enough that I might replay Shadowgrounds and find that more enjoyable. Oh well, can’t win ’em all, I guess.
I know Frozenbyte are basically “the Trine guys” at this point, but there’s a small bit of me that almost wants a new Shadowgrounds. Granted with the top-down shooter genre being flooded by Vampire Survivors and their ilk of spontaneous roguelike action, it might not be feasible, but I think it would be neat. I’ll get around to playing one of the 5 (!!) Trine games eventually. Maybe in 2034.
Shadowgrounds: Survivor is on Steam and other PC digital storefronts. Sometimes it goes on sale alongside its bigger brother at a few bucks, and honestly $1.49 is the right price for this kind of game. But be prepared to be disappointed, especially if you’re playing this immediately after the original Shadowgrounds.
Since this game uses a bunch of physics, I’m suddenly enamored by all the games that forced in PhysX into their games, especially the more tech demo types like Cellfactor: Revolution. With Nvidia slowly winding down PhysX being required on newer video cards, it’s kinda like a funeral to the 2000s era of PC gaming: where we see boxes and barrels fall in cool ways and think it’s the most amazing thing we’ve ever seen. There’s little to no tech whimsy like that anymore, it’s all making old games get the RTX treatment at the cost of a coherent art style, or shoving generative AI into everything. It’s a damn shame, really.
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