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Shadowgrounds Survivor is a sequel/expansion for the popular 3^rd person shooter Shadowgrounds by Frozenbyte. Rather than taking place after the story in the original Shadowgrounds, Survivor's story takes place simultaneously in a different part of Ganymede. Shadowgrounds Survivor is filled with heroic endeavors, dark humour, and fast-paced action. The amount of gore packed into this game is along the lines of the Doom and Fallout series'. The gory, gooey carnage throughout Survivor created a warm, viscous feeling in the pit of my stomach. This having been said, Shadowgrounds Survivor is definitely not for the faint of heart.

In Survivor you play as one of three characters; a marine, a napalm specialist and a sniper. Each character has his or her own weapons and skillsets making it necessary for the player to modify strategy slightly with each change in characters. While the main premise of blowing away hordes of aliens is the same, the manner in which each class is best suited for killing said aliens varies somewhat. The characters gain experience from killing monsters and level up giving them skill points. These skill points can be used to purchase skills such as increased health (5 skill points), a motion detector HUD(5 skill points), or automatic medkit use(25 skill points). Also, seemingly randomly throughout the game, monsters will drop weapon parts which can be stockpiled and used to upgrade your favorite weapons. In the preview of Shadowgrounds Survivor as soon as I had enough parts to purchase the Auto-Lock for the pistol, I rarely used any other weapon. The one-hit-kill after acquiring auto-lock made the pistol amazingly overpowered. I was happy to see that in the full game they removed the ability to auto-lock larger enemies while keeping the ability for smaller enemies.

Gameplay in Survivor is a little different from your average shooter. WASD keys determine the direction of movement while the mouse determines direction of weapons fire. Moving the mouse to the edge of the screen causes the view to turn in that direction much more smoothly than in the preview version. The Story Mode is composed of several chapters with each chapter taking about fifteen minutes to completion. Along with the Story Mode is the Survivor Mode where endless masses of alien scum crawl out of every nook and cranny of the level all hell-bent on ripping your character apart. You are scored on the amount of time to survive and the number of kills you achieve.

The audio in Survivor was what one might expect from an edge-of-your-seat carnage-packed gore-fest. Weapons-fire is over-exaggerated but believable, voice-acting is crisp and well-done, gore is goo-ily splattered and explosions are explosive. The graphics are crisp and very detailed. The lighting, models, shaders, textures and particle effects are wonderfully realized. The terrain is crisp and the lighting and shadows very realistic. The models have high poly-counts making them very lively, and the weather effects, largely rain and snow, look realistic and actually seem cold and wet. Unfortunately this means Survivor will likely not be playable on older, dated machines.

Unfortunately I never had the chance to play the original Shadowgrounds by Frozenbyte. Having played Shadowgrounds Survivor I am definitely intending on purchasing a copy of the original to see how they compare. I would not suggest this game for those faint of heart, squeamish, or who find immense gore and carnage offensive. I greatly enjoyed the unending masses of aliens which I splattered all over the landscape with pistol, machine gun, and flame thrower.