But wintery New Englander Plath, for all her dark desolation, couldn't be farther from the Southern bayou, savage, exotic feel of voodoo New Orleans, where Shadow Man is set. Main character Mike LeRoi is an English lit graduate, and like many with such degrees, he has trouble finding work in his chosen field. He instead becomes a part-time hit man, spending his days sending men to the shadow world. His career is abruptly cut short, however, when he, along with his family, is killed in a car accident.

Meanwhile, Mama Nettie, a powerful force in the New Orleans voodoo world, dreams of the Apocalypse. She sees five serial killers open portals between the world of the living - Liveside - and the world of the dead - Deadside. And the Five guide the damned souls through the portals, then use them to take over Liveside.

In terror, Mama Nettie creates the Mask of Shadows, resurrects LeRoi, and implants the mask in his chest, transforming him into the voodoo warrior Shadow Man, whose task is to prevent the early Apocalypse Mama Nettie envisioned.

As Shadow Man, you load each hand up with one of 50 weapons, from the Shadowgun to the .50 Desert Eagle, enabling you to kill twice as quickly. Visibility in game environments is remarkable - you see well into the horizon, and the fog is far more for effect than cover-up. Iguana UK attributes this to its VISTA (Virtually Integrated Scenic TerrAin) engine, which takes advantage of binary space partition technology and essentially lets you see all the way to the horizon - without having to shroud anything in fog.

And the seeing is a pleasure when the graphics are as good as these. The version of the game we saw was running on a high-end PC with a 3Dfx card, so the graphics on the Nintendo and PlayStation will obviously be different. But the graphics are incredibly lush - and creepy.

From the Asylum to the London Underground, you'll cross over from the world of the living to the world of the dead, both equally unnerving in completely different ways: Each Liveside location is home to one of the serial killers (like the Florida Everglades, the New York tenements), and each Deadside environment is filled with dead people and zombies.

Because you can use both hands, you'll have the advantage of being able to do two things at once, much like a real person can - you can fire your gun with one hand and pick up keys, unlock a door, or perform some similarly useful action with the other. Or, as Guy Miller, project manager for Shadow Man, points out, you can do all kinds of things like "Killing, with two guns. Killing, with one gun and a voodoo weapon. Killing, with a gun in one hand and a flashlight in the other. Killing, with a gun in one hand as you pull yourself up a cliff face with the other hand. Killing, with a voodoo weapon in one hand as you hang with the other hand from a rope suspended above a chasm.... The killing permutations of the player-character's ambidexterity are pretty much endless."

Shadow Man is a third-person adventure and bears the inevitable comparison to Tomb Raider. There is some similarity in play, but bringing that up seems to irk Miller. "Tomb Raider is fundamentally linear, fundamentally a flick-a-switch shooter, fundamentally annoying in that each jump you make must be pixel-perfect, and you get punished for not making that pixel-perfect jump. Shadow Man is nonlinear, is not merely a flick-a-switch shooter, will not punish you with pixel-perfect jumps, and has locational gameplay, inasmuch as the environments will dictate the type of gameplay." Gameplay, he argues, is instead a combination of Marioesque platform/puzzle-solving (about 50 percent) and bloody gore fests (50 percent).

Also, Iguana UK has designed Shadow Man as a more nonlinear game. You still have certain tasks that must be accomplished before others are even attempted, but you'll also play through sections where the levels can be completed in any order you choose, and some backtracking and zigzagging through levels is required in order to complete the game. But whichever path you choose through the game, all routes lead to a single end. "There's a mystery at the heart of the game," Miller says, "the answer to which'll blow your mind and make you wonder if you're really playing a game at all." (Staff)

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