Neon Shadow

I went into Neon Shadow with modest expectations and came out mostly satisfied, which is about the right temperature for a budget retro shooter that started life as a mobile port. The Steam version positions itself as an upgraded release - tighter controls, improved visuals - and on that front it delivers. What you get is a straightforward, no-jumping, no-reloading corridor FPS that pulls hard from the Doom and Quake playbook: hunt down enemies, grab health packs off the floor, destroy a powercore at the end of the level, backtrack to the elevator. If regenerating health and ability trees are your baseline expectation for a shooter in 2024, Neon Shadow will feel aggressively stripped down. If you miss the era when map geometry was the puzzle, you'll find something genuine here. The weapon set is small - four guns - but they're reasonably distinct and each has a practical role. The shotgun handles close-quarters frantic pushes, the grenade launcher works on a proper ballistic arc (closer to Quake than anything), and there's a BFG-style beam weapon with a meaningful pre-fire delay that actually asks you to think about when you commit. No loadout menus, no unlocks, no battle pass currency. You pick up what the level gives you. Time-to-kill is punchy and the enemy mechanoids press with numbers rather than individual AI sophistication, which keeps the pacing honest. Level design shifts between tight corridor chokepoints and occasional open loading bays, and the better maps have a flanking drone or two that will catch you off guard after you've memorized the route - a small but welcome touch that stops the campaign from going completely on autopilot. Here's where I have to be straight with you about the multiplayer. The modes exist: online deathmatch, LAN deathmatch, and a couple of extra modes including a Mutant variant where the kill-leader gets powered up and becomes everyone else's target, plus an Instakill mode with one-shot laser rifles. On paper that's a decent little pick-up-and-play suite. In practice, finding an organic online match is a long shot. The player pool on Steam is thin, the lobby system is basic, and there's no Steamworks friend-invite integration that actually works cleanly. If you have three friends who will commit to a LAN session or a coordinated online window, you can get some genuinely frantic four-player deathmatch going. If you're expecting to queue into a live lobby at random, manage expectations hard. Bot matches are available, which softens the blow, but bots are bots. Performance on PC is light and the frame rate headroom is there, though early community reports flagged a 60fps cap with no obvious 144hz unlock in settings - fine for a retro shooter where the movement pace doesn't demand high polling rate precision, but worth knowing if you run a high-refresh setup. The cyberpunk soundtrack from Abducted by Sharks is a genuine asset, pushing the atmosphere past what the corridor visuals alone would manage. The campaign is short - a few hours on normal difficulty - and multiple difficulty tiers from Rookie up to Nightmare give it some replay legs if you want to push for level-end score grades. Bottom line: this is a competent, no-frills retro FPS that the original Doom crowd will clock in two evenings. The solo campaign is worth the asking price if retro shooters are your thing. The multiplayer infrastructure just isn't there to back up what the modes promise.

Fred · Scout Team

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