Found some old posts I made on the game:
8 hours for initial normal playthrough, 7.5 hours for the hard playthrough (1 hour of which was red gem farming via the save glitch), and 4.5 hours for the easy playthrough.
Mostly liking Shadows of the Damned so far, other than a few control issues. If you just press X you do a 180 degree quick turn, but if you press a direction + X you do a dodge roll. I almost never need to use the quick turn (since if they approach you from behind you can whack them via a quick time circle button press) but I've lost track of the amount of times I've gone to do a dodge roll, did a 180 turn instead, and the projectile hit me in the back. The camera is also a little too close that if they get up next to you but not RIGHT next to you, you have a blind spot. That's probably a necessity since many of the corridors are quite narrow.
There are also sections where you have to outrun a crazed creature through a dark forest. To see the path you have to quickly stop, aim, and hit lanterns with secondary fire (light shot) to turn them on. You also have to hold the secondary fire to charge it and instead of a light shot it fires a small bomb which you use to clear debris in your way. Several times it took too long for my aim to line up, so I held secondary fire too long so I would fire a bomb instead of a light shot which doesn't trigger the lantern even if you hit it dead on. I could switch weapons to ensure that wouldn't happen, but that takes time too to switch off the one with the bomb and then back to it when you need to clear debris.
The trophy list is pretty perfect as it is a mix of story progression, X kills with all the weapons + each upgrade, and trick shots. It's a shame the difficulty trophies don't stack. I wouldn't have minded two since the difficulty goes up to keep you engaged, but I have a feeling the 3rd easy playthrough is going to be really boring.
Finished Shadows of the Damned normal difficulty yesterday, the banter was fairly amusing, and the gunplay was pretty good. I just wish the dodge roll was a little smoother (same button as the quick turn so i kept turning instead of dodging) and the difficulty trophies don't stack.
In the process right now of farming red upgrade gems through a save glitch in 2-1 in a new hard playthrough because there really isn't a legitimate way to max all upgrades for the trophy (and there is no NG+ or replay chapter option). You either have to abuse a save glitch to continuously collect the same red gem or abuse the few infinite enemy spawn locations in the game to stockpile white gem currency to buy red gems. You can find red gems hidden in the world, but the amount hidden isn't even half of what you need to get all the upgrades so the only way to max upgrades is varying degrees of exploitation. The only thing worse than a collectibles trophy is a collectibles trophy that doesn't even get you halfway to completion when you collect everything available.
Hard mode down, apparently that unlocked an even harder difficulty level but
that. Difficulty level basically spikes damage to you (looks like 1X for easy, 2X for normal, and 4X for hard) and also increases the HP of the enemies by a similar ratio. By the time I got to the last 3 bosses it became hella tedious because it took so many bullets to kill them. By the time I killed the main final boss I was down to a 1/3rd of my shells for the shotgun, was completely out of pistol bullets (I
ing never run out of pistol bullets) and had about 30 rounds of machine gun ammo, ridiculous.
