Shadow Warrior 3 will release in March, according to Microsoft

Shadow Warrior 3 will release on March 1, according to its listing on the Microsoft Store. You could write it off as placeholder text, but the Microsoft Store is notoriously leaky when it comes to publishing release dates before they're officially announced, so I'm going to place my money on it being correct.

According to the Microsoft Store listing, pre-ordering Shadow Warrior 3 will also get you the first two rebooted games free, as well as a Limited Edition Katana Skin. Sure, you may have picked up those games either free or extremely cheap over the last few years, but that's about as generous as pre-order bonuses come.

Flying Wild Hog's third Shadow Warrior game was meant to release last year, before it was moved into 2022 with an 'official delay trailer'. Named so, presumably to distinguish it from all those pesky unofficial delay trailers. This latest game will do away with some of the more controversial aspects of Shadow Warrior 2, chiefly its focus on loot. Instead, it'll more closely resemble the first game, with its fairly linear, gung ho approach.

"We don't want to draw the player's attention away from the action," game designer Pawel Kowalewski told us in 2020. "We don't want anyone standing in place for five minutes wondering what upgrade they should put on their weapon to increase some stat for whatever percent. We are going back to the first Shadow Warrior, but we are upgrading everything."

The extended gameplay trailer definitely bears that out: it looks like an incredibly fast, very violent, and joyously stupid videogame—as has often been the case with the Shadow Warrior series, which was originally a 1990s Build engine game. It looks like we'll find out for sure come March.

Shaun Prescott is the Australian editor of PC Gamer. With over ten years experience covering the games industry, his work has appeared on GamesRadar+, TechRadar, The Guardian, PLAY Magazine, the Sydney Morning Herald, and more. Specific interests include indie games, obscure Metroidvanias, speedrunning, experimental games and FPSs. He thinks Lulu by Metallica and Lou Reed is an all-time classic that will receive its due critical reappraisal one day.