Shadow Fight 4: Arena is the first PVP game in the mobile fighting game series.
The game features the same fluid and smooth animations seen in the previous games but instead of building your character with gear like in the previous entries, you are collecting boss characters from the previous games and levelling them up by collecting shards of each character. I’ll be honest, this isn’t as exciting as chasing gear like before. While the fighting is fun as always, the grind is a bit bland. Opening a chest only to get shards of a character which you need a certain amount of to be able to level is hardly exciting. In the previous games you had to take note of the armour and weapons you were getting and in Shadow Fight 3 your gear determined your fighting style. There is some depth in the fact that you can choose the skills you want to unlock for each character but at the end of the day, your character has the same move set as they did when you first got them. But this simpler approach probably scales with the PVP system better than the gear system with Shadow Fight 3.
Other than PVP there is a light story mode which adds some rouge-lite elements to the game. I enjoy these quite a bit. You have to survive 12 rounds with increasingly tougher enemies and after each round you can choose perks to aid you. Do you want to hit harder or regenerate more health at the start of the next round?
There is some strategy to this mode and I hope to see more of it in future games in the series.
Shadow Fight 4: Arena has a Fight pass which leans into the ‘gacha’ system of the game. You unlock chests that have a random set of shards inside. You have no idea who you will get. I’ve been surprised getting characters out of chests and other times I just got more shards for characters I already had which isn’t a bad thing. You can buy skins as well.
The game is fun for a quick ass kicker here and there. Also, it is Shadow Fight and I have a soft spot for this franchise! So I’d say check it out if you want something fun to play while on the go!
