Shadow Cloud Gaming Review: Better Than Stadia and GeForce NOW?.
Hello and welcome back to Cloudwards.net. My name’s Mauricio, and in this video, we’re going to look at one of the best cloud gaming services around, Shadow. It’s an impressive service in its own right, but does it have the chops to take down Stadia and GeForce Now? Let’s find out.
Before getting into it, make sure you subscribe and hit that bell icon to be notified whenever we upload. Cloud gaming is all the rage right now, and for good reason. The idea of being able to play PC quality games on any device connected to the internet is appealing.
Still, the Microsofts and Googles of the world haven’t been able to fully deliver on the cloud gaming promise, with their services littered with poor image quality and terrible input lag. If you want to watch on overview of the best cloud gaming services make sure to click the popout banner at the top where we’ve compiled a comparison of the top services in the field.
Shadow is the closest thing we’ve found to a local gaming experience in the cloud. Instead of giving you a bite-sized chunk of a server, Shadow gives you a full Windows 10 PC in the cloud. It’s like if you were using Parsec or Teamviewer with your own high powered gaming computer.
Shadow just handles the maintenance and upgrades for you. You can do anything on Shadow that you could do on a normal Windows 10 machine, but of course we went to gaming first. We tested a variety of games with the service, including Cuphead, the Resident Evil 2 remake and Doom 2016.
Pushing full HD at over 100 frames per second, we were able to run all of these games with ease. There was some input lag, but not enough that it should be noticable. Going from a local PC to Shadow, you’ll notice a difference. However, if you’re accustomed to playing on consoles with a wireless controller, the input lag is about the same.
Up until recently, the big caveat with Shadow was its price. Thankfully, that problem has been solved. Shadow now has three plans instead of charging a flat thirty five dollar per month rate. At the time of recording, only one plan is available, which runs twelve dollars per month but they’ve told us they’ll roll the rest of the plans out very soon.
Shadow is still a little more expensive than the competition, but now the monthly price is more in-line with what we’d expect and if you click the link in the description below you’ll get a $5 discount on your first month of using shadow. That extra cost is worth it, though.
Shadow doesn’t come with any games like PlayStation Now, but its library isn’t limited in any way. If the game can run on a normal Windows 10 computer, it can run on Shadow. Furthermore, you’ll still own the games you buy on Steam and the like if Shadow goes bust.
From performance to game support to price, Shadow is the perfect cloud gaming service. There’s one glaring issue, though: coverage. Shadow is only available in the continental U.S., and even then some states aren’t fully supported yet. As long as you’re in one of the supported states, Shadow is a slam dunk.
We don’t crown Shadow as the best cloud gaming service lightly. The space has some fierce competition, with Stadia, GeForce Now and PlayStation Now all fighting for the title. For us, it’s all about performance. Although each of those services have strengths in one area or another, they don’t perform as well as Shadow does.
