"Silence, fool. I've suffered your presence long enough." Shadow is a very cold outsider. He comes off as arrogant, ruthless and uncaring, believing that he is superior to others, especially Sonic, and will let nothing stand in the way of his goals, whatever they may be. He secretly envies Sonic. Easily angered and aggressive to the extreme, he is perfectly willing and able to kill or otherwise seriously injure his foes. He also believes that justice (or at least his justice) must be delivered at any cost. Despite how brutal he can be, Shadow still usually holds a calm and collected attitude and sticks firmly to his goals, never resting until they are fulfilled.

Because of his pride, Shadow is also fiercely independent. He openly despises working with others, whether they are on his side or not, and does not like collaboration unless it works towards his own goals. This is best seen in "It Takes a Village To Defeat A Hedgehog", where Shadow was willing to work with Team Eggman to fight Sonic, yet abandoned the group when he deemed them weak and incapable (although, ironically, their teamwork and collaboration was relatively efficient when they attacked Team Sonic). As a true testament to his rogue attitude, Shadow (or at least in Rise of Lyric) believes that friendship is a weakness that holds others back and makes them weak, and chooses to seclude himself from others to avoid this. As per his reasoning of hating friendship, Shadow is a large social darwinist, although he will compliment or at least acknowledge strength when he sees it. He also has no patience for jokes or foolishness and no problem with voicing his distaste of and criticizing others.

This Shadow is also darker and less comedic, a lot of the time he is played completely serious, as while the original can have a few dry jokes at times, this Shadow very rarely does. This Shadow is also presented as a lot more evil than his original counterpart as he is portrayed as a full villain compared to the original anti-villain. An example of this is in the end of Shattered Crystal when Sticks finds the meaning of teamwork, Shadow simply scoffs and calls her pathetic. He is incredibly shallow and has a distaste for friendship, like in Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric, where he states Sonic is weak because of his reliance on his friends. This is strange, seeing as the Shadow from the main series has people that he would consider his friends.

One of his most notable traits, Shadow is an incredibly vengeful person. If somebody, like Lyric, Eggman or Sonic, wrongs or underestimates him, he will relentlessly track them down and seek to get revenge for whatever they did. Shadow will give absolute punishment to anyone over anything, minor or major, and will expand his vengeance to include people who did nothing to him, like Orbot, Cubot and the rest of Team Sonic. The most extreme case of this is shown in the aforementioned "Eggman the Videogame: Part 2", in which he decides to destroy the entire universe after being repeatedly tricked by Eggman, and further cements his nihilistic views by calling the universe "pathetic".