What happens when you combine Metroid and the curiosity of Western game developers? You get Shadow Complex.

What It Is: A bunch of people who happen to have a love of Castlevania: Symphony of The Night and Super Metroid, banding up together to make a 2-D game of epic proportions. Based off of Orson Scott Card’s Empire universe, Shadow Complex’s story starts off in a couple’s camping trip that goes horribly wrong. Enter the hero, who after spelunking in a cave and acquiring his girlfriend’s camping gear (basically the game’s tutorial sequence), finds out that his girlfriend gets kidnapped by a bunch of armored soldiers. Naturally, you follow the kidnappers and go in a 2D adventure chock-filled with exploration, run-and-gun action, and powers acquisition. If this doesn’t sound like Konami and Nintendo’s aforementioned adventure franchises, you obviously haven’t been gaming too long.

Yes, you will gain badass power suits and kick-ass weapons like the foam gun which can make frosty platforms out of thin air (pictured below) and yes, you will have different set of items to help get you past previously-inaccessible levels.  Hell, when I started off the demo, I was well-equipped with rocket launching guns and decked in full armor before flashing back to the doomed camping trip scene. To follow 3D principles, you also have to worry about killing enemies in the background and foreground while you’re standing at the middleground. You auto-aim who or what you shoot at in the background or foreground. It’s like that LittleBigPlanet plane system, only instead of jumping, you’ll be shooting.

The game boasts more than 120 power-ups and will fight bosses ten times his size, as evident with the giant robot spider fight above. And holy s***, does it look and sound good, and we’re not using the “for an XBLA title” tagline. It can pretty much go toe-to-toe with a high production retail game.

What It Isn’t: A long playtest. I basically got 20 minutes to start from the beginning of the demo. Even with the gracious help of the booth attendant who knows his ins and outs of the game, I still wanted more. Luckily, I don’t have to wait that long, and neither will the rest of you, as Shadow Complex is coming out next month just in time for American Summer. The game will also eat up two gigs of space in your XBox hard drive; judging from the level of polish and beauty of the game, it seems understandable. What do you think?

Oh yeah, regarding the quotes I used in the title: Chair Entertainment, the developers behind Shadow Complex,  are under Epic Games (you know, the company with Cliff Bleszinski).

In Short: Next month, set some money aside for what could be one of 2009’s best downloadable game.