One of the consequences of Xbox Live Arcade’s download on demand distribution and lower game price points has been the return of 2D gaming.

Shadow Complex continues this trend, but developer Chair Entertainment makes use of Epic’s Unreal Engine 3 to provide it with all the superb 3D character models, environment and lighting effects one would expect of a modern console game.

You start off as just a guy with a gun.  You can do simple leaps and jumps, but the bad guys live in one of those huge underground fortresses that is replete with power ups like grenades, missiles, and this game’s unusual addition to the genre, the foam gun.  As you progress, you’ll piece together a power suit that provides longer leaps and the “double jump” ability, a grappling hook, and a cool hyper-speed run acceleration that lets you crash through barriers and even run on water or up walls.

The power-ups both open up new areas to you, and encourage you to revisit old areas to find the secret stashes of items that you weren’t able to get to the first time through.  As in the best games in this genre, the design has you traveling through old areas to accomplish new things, and that second trip through an area also gives you an opportunity to pick up stuff you missed so it rarely feels like tedious backtracking over the same old, same old.

If you enjoy super-hard death-mazes and obstacle courses, there are some available in the “challenge mode” levels, but the main game is accessible to any player and doesn’t require a whole lot of tricky maneuvering.  Combat is also fairly easy at the normal difficulty level, which is a good thing, because combat is one area where the game does fall down a bit.  The pseudo 3D nature of Shadow Complex makes the game visually more interesting than if it were a flat 2D, but as a result, players are forced to use and rely on an auto-aim to hit enemies that are “deeper” into the screen.  This makes aiming feel imprecise, and when auto-aim fails to target properly, you’ll end up spraying the walls and ceiling with bullets while the bad guys take free shots at you.

Overall, at a price point of 1200 live points, or about fifteen dollars, this is a worthwhile buy for some fun old-school play with great modern graphics.