Previews// Shadows of the Damned

While most enemies will be happy to go down after a few bullets to the head, some won’t be taken out so easily. Certain undead creatures will be covered in darkness - a blue aura that empowers them and protects them from any standard attack.

To overcome this, Garcia has an alternative mode to each weapon that pelts out unlimited bursts of pure light. Shooting the aura with these will make the darkness disappear, and allow you to pump some real lead into them.

You won’t just find enemies covered in darkness either - sometimes you’ll encounter entire rooms that are enveloped in darkness. Naturally, when you’re in these kinds of rooms you can’t attack any enemies at all - not even light bullets will work on them because the darkness is overpowering.

While Garcia is bathed in blue the screen shudders and the rocker starts to lose control. I wasn’t told exactly what would happen if he was left in the darkness for too long, but I did notice a transformation period where Garcia gained glowing eyes and a demonic stature. So it’s probably best you try to get yourself out of these situations before something truly bad happens.

In true SUDA 51 fashion, there’s only one way you can cleanse darkness rooms - and that’s by shooting mounted goat heads with light bullets. Yep. Goat heads. I don’t know either. Fire a shot at the goat, and the blue dissipates, allowing you to attack enemies and travel across the room safely. In later rooms you’ll need to shoot out several of these mounted heads to cleanse different parts of the level, adding a bit of puzzle-action to the proceedings.

There will be a fair share of bosses to Shadows of the Damned as well. One particular encounter saw me fight an ugly mechanical beast, summoned by an operatic devil songstress known as Justine. This was your standard mini-boss fare - dodge the big guy’s charges, fire rounds of light bullets to reveal weak spots and then pump lead ‘til it’s dead.

It will be interesting to see the variety of bosses SUDA 51 and Shinji Mikami have in store for us - particularly as No More Heroes is essentially a big boss rush in itself, so we could be in for a treat here.

At the end of my playtest, Garcia had found a creature that he thought was Paula… instead it ended up being a rather nasty, blood-soaked beefcake called ‘George.’ It seems that there’s going to be a lot of twists and turns to this underworld adventure, and I can’t wait to play more.

Shadows of the Damned is heading for a November 2011 release on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 - just perfect for some Hallowe’en horror!