Shadow Warrior 3 is a fast-paced FPS for adults. It is designed for those who enjoy playing Lo Wang, a caricature of East Asia and a human dickhead. He's a parade of silly one-liners and innuendos, and he's relentless to the point of regularly cutting each other off in the middle of gunfights. He's the kind of guy who, shortly after meeting the only female character in the game, appreciates how fuckable she is. He is the answer to the question that no one ever asked: "If Deadpool was so indifferent to racism that you had to be him for seven to ten hours. [because he unleashed an army of banished hell dragons and their specters and accidentally destroyed world civilization. It ends with me being depressed that I had to play this game. In between, the shootout ensues, and the inevitable feeling that the legacy of the original 1997 game is better forgotten.

The rhythm of Shadow Warrior 3's throwback shooter could be enjoyed any number of other places. What the single-player-only campaign in the combat arena excels at is finding flow in full-speed firefights. Movement is constant. Cover is irrelevant. No need for bloody descriptions. Survival is a constant parkour of air dashes, double jumps, and wall-running.

Law One's weapons range from standard semi-automatic handguns to unconventional ones like crossbows that shoot shurikens. The shotgun, in particular, packs a low-pitched punch, mulching the specter's food and ensuring its satisfaction. Quickly-charged chi blasts knock back enemies, and retractable grappling provides an escape from the specter's mosh pit when space is needed.

The rhythm is aided by a resource management game that runs parallel to the high-speed shooting. Ammunition and stamina are scattered throughout the combat area, but the most reliable means of supply is the enemy itself. Right-click melee attacks with Law One's katana generate ammunition on hits and kills, and a refilling finisher meter allows for health replenishment and execution for bonus effects specific to each enemy type. There are many notes here taken from 2016's Doom, and they are equally dire: the fleshy gob elements are so high that they are almost exhausting.

These finishers provide an additional strategic layer. The most basic enemies temporarily increase maximum health or grant quick bonuses, such as freeze grenades that ice the brains of specters. Larger, tougher enemies instead offer "gore tools." A "gore tool" is a temporary, high-damage weapon reworked from the horrific parts of a specter's corpse, like a hammer made from the lower part of a demon's fleshy spine. [while slicing through waves of specters, harvesting low-level specters for ammunition and finisher bonuses as needed. Of course, that means more corpses to interrupt my acrobatic combat. Finding this balance can be fun.

Over time, momentum is broken. Character and weapon upgrades ensure a steady decline in HP and ammunition, and the rhythm of decision making in combat flattens out. The gruesome novelty doesn't last long, as each enemy type has only one finisher animation. Even with the variety of platforming sequences that break up the march of the combat arena, each battle now tests your patience, and Shadow Warrior 3 has no good ideas to increase the difficulty level beyond introducing more and more numerous and formidable demons. Toward the end of the game, every battle becomes a bloated, drawn-out affair with bullet-sponge-like enemies lasting 10 minutes or more.

Of course, at this point, Lo Wang has already spent hours making the experience as excruciating as possible. From the first cut scene to the end credits, any little success is punished by having to listen to Lo Wang's God-awful banter several times a minute; over the course of seven hours, I heard Lo Wang yell hashtags hundreds of times, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who's heard him do it. Lo Wang thinks the specter is ugly. Lo Wang thinks he should clip the last headshot. Every time he wins a fight, he risks triggering a Lo Wan-based innuendo. Now is your chance to hear Lo Wang sing "Another One Bites the Dust." Shaking the Katana means risking one of his three variations on the same long-running infomercial about how to slice, dice, and shred French fries for four payments of $19.99.

Since his first appearance in 1997's "Kagemusha," he has been slowed down by reboots, but he is still inevitably the funny Asian man Westerners imagine him to be, as an excuse for dick jokes and a silly accent.

At least for the first time in 25 years, the accent is not being played by a white guy with a vocal yellow face. How much of a triumph that is, I don't know. The soundtrack is a stereotypical Frankenstein's monster of East Asian music. Yes, Orientalist kung fu fighting riffs are sampled. Yes, a gong rings out at the end of each battle.

On the other hand, the Japan depicted by "Kagemusha 3" is a never-ending sea of pagodas and Buddhist statues, a landscape of mountain pillars that, to my untrained eye, could only have been inspired by pictures of the Chinese karst mountains. Like the soundtrack and Lo Wang himself, it feels like an exaggerated parody. I don't expect any game, much less one with two-step jumps, to be as accurate as a live-action game. But again, the question should not be left unanswered: who would have thought to take real people in a real place and reduce it to an empty fantasyland?

I don't think the game cares. I think Polish studios are content with homogeneous and unspecific ideas of what it means to be "Asian." It must be comforting for the game to know that even in the midst of growing global anti-Asian chauvinism, many players can enjoy the game without discomfort. After all, Lo Wang is the protagonist. Isn't that a compliment?

In one cutscene, the camera pulls back to show Lo Wan's censored crotch. Then he farts.

Shadow Warrior 3 is best experienced with the dialogue volume set to zero and subtitles turned off. No offense intended. It's tasteless. It's embarrassing because it expects you to be the kind of person who enjoys it. Just play Doom 2016 instead.