Shadows of Doubt XBOX Review 5.5/10 "A Fantastic Premise Sandbagged By Technical Issues" 🕵️ @colejefferies #IndieGame #GameDev #IndieGameDev

Much like my review for Cloudpunk and more recently, Wartales, Shadows of Doubt is a game that is packed with great ideas, a cracking premise, eyecatching visuals and intriguing gameplay, but is hamstrung by technical issues that will hopefully be a distant memory after several months’ worth of updates and patches – but sadly can’t be ignored at the time of launch.

Shadows of Doubt is game that I’ve been following for a while, the premise of being a private detective in a dystopian future comprised of glorious voxels, spending your days solving cases and scouting for clues very much appealed to me. When it was announced for consoles, my trousers were neatly folded in a drawer, hopefully to never be needed again. 

You can choose to play the main campaign scenario, or instead choose one of three separate neighbourhoods and make your own way through the randomly-generated cities, solving crimes ad-hoc as you go. These ‘quets’ can be found pinned up on notice boards in the City Hall, and various  diners and apartment block hallways that you pass through, usually involving finding lost property, or assisting the local enforcers in capturing a criminal.

The vast majority of your crime-solving will be spent tying clues together, keeping tabs on your board of myriad notes etc. and finding ways into areas that are covered by cameras and security systems. This is where the game really shines, I chose to make my way through the main campaign, and scanning crime scenes for fingerprints, looking through emails on computers I’d hacked, and scouting apartments for four-digit codes to unlock safes and hidden rooms was all getting me hot under the collar.

Yes, the frame rate was a bit unreliable, and pop-in and lighting issues raised their ugly heads (usually in the outdoor sections)– but the main thrust of the game was absolute bliss, and I really felt like I was having a lot of fun in this voxel world, interviewing citizens, scanning through city directories for certain suspects, witnesses and locations – even scrubbing through surveillance footage for information. I was also amused by the amount of littering that the citizens did, the council really need to up their game! The level of depth and freedom is very much to be celebrated, and for a while, I thought I’d had a GOTY on my hands…

The issues though, soon mounted. I’ve mentioned the frame rate and lighting pop-in, but the noir-ish mood is also affected by the stabs of music that seemingly randomly happen. The music and atmosphere is great, but I noticed that there was no theme to when it dropped in and out, to the point that I thought there was something glitching, which is a shame as it’s really great ambient stuff! That suits the steamy, rainswept mood of the city.

I also found that odd audio artefacts were happening that didn’t seem right, and the ‘clue board’ that you open up was hard to keep track off as I built up my cases due to items being moved to the bottom-left corner, piling up messily on top of each other and getting awkward to select and move back into the main body of the board.

These were all relatively minor niggles, but nonetheless impacted gameplay. With a game of this type, with a lot of mechanics juggling and a level of complexity and depth to the menus, teething issues are to be expected, but the more time I spent with the game, the more severe the issues unfortunately got.

I found myself routinely quitting out and restarting the game whenever things got a bit glitchy, as I was worried that they would mount up and affect my save files in the long run (I look at you ELEX 2) and for the most part, this seemed to solve the issues. At one point, I thought that everyone in the game had gone to bed early, or something - as the streets were suddenly empty…but it turned out that all characters and items in the game were in the game… they had just become invisible…but could still be interacted with.

Again – a restart solved this, but it happened several times. I also hit a weird bug where – whenever I tried to scroll through surveillance footage, the screen would go bright white and the camera would only be able to rotate in a wide circle around my character – although I managed to get the information I needed to move the case forward, it was a shonky and unenjoyable section of the game, due to the bug and again happened a couple of times.

However, the one bug that ground the game to a halt for me was when I needed to state a password to someone that allowed me access to a building in order to move my investigation forward, and the game flat-out froze on me, and the only way I could get out of it was to quit to the main Xbox menu a few times - this would kick it back into gear - but only to the level that I could quit out of the conversation and do something else, trying to enter the password again kept leading to the same issue – effectively halting my game.

It was a heart-breaking realisation to get so joyfully stuck into a game that is clearly made with passion and skill to find that it just…well… it doesn’t feel ready for release. I’m not sure how Shadows of Doubt runs on other consoles and systems, but at present, it’s a hard one to recommend on Xbox because there are so many issues throughout. 

SUMMARY

I fully intend to revisit Shadows of Doubt after a few updates, and I’m sure that it can be the game that it ought to be. I will definitely be re-reviewing this in a few months as I still feel that this could be a game of the year contender, as it’s a unique and immersive experience… it’s just not quite there yet.