Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun

Balanced on a fence? Need to jump off at a precise moment to take out a hard-to-get target? Good luck. Your character will stare at the flat ground two feet below them with terror as you try hopelessly to find the precise pixel that will show the jump option. Meanwhile your opportunity is vanishing, and you'll take to pounding the movement key while moving your mouse around, just hoping that you'll stumble upon that elusive sweet spot. Maybe, you think to yourself, the problem could be solved if you rotate the camera. So you try do so so in a way that will show the character and their target, and those three buildings won't ALWAYS be in the way. But no, now you've lost the opportunity. Similar to the above, good luck throwing bodies off cliffs when you're in a rush.You have 2.5 seconds until the trio of guards' vision cone lights up like a Christmas tree? All you need to do is throw the body and you're golden? Nope. You're screwed. You'll spend about five seconds trying to find the precise location, which looks like every location around you, from which you can throw the body. I guess that makes the characters obsessive compulsives. They have to do things at the precisely correct location. Another irritant? Sure, how about how they repeat the same damn phrases every ten seconds, with only about four or five variants. "An Elegant solution" "How elegant" "Elegantly done" "I will do so. Elegantly". No, that doesn't get tiring at all. Do you love RTS without pauses while you try to use up to 5 characters? You're in luck. You can tell everyone to do an action at the exact same time, but you can't chain actions, and you can't pause to issue new orders, or even pause while lining up their actions. Time keeps marching forward. Enemies are quick-draw artists. In the 0.1 seconds between them spotting you and you killing them with the weapon you are already plunging into their heart they will pull out their gun and shoot you with a marksman's accuracy. Never missing.

This game made me relieve all those times when me and my older cousin tried to beat the Commandos series to 100%. Those were fun times and this game catches this noltasgia feeling and ties it up with a nice plot, beautiful graphics and superb gameplay. Love it so far.

This is a worthy successor to the Commandos/Desperados game series and I really enjoyed it. I don't know why, but I always get myself attached to this characters: it was the same with Tiny and French, with Doc and Cooper, with Robin and Little John etc. Now it's Mugen, Yuki and Aiko.

I never really played the old commando's games, and I've always been really bad rts games despite loving them. I Played through the first time sneaking around with primarily one character picking off enemies one by one because controlling more than 2 was a bit overhwelming at first, then after I played the game a bit I discovered the multitude of ways to beat each level, while there is for sure a "best" way to beat it. It's so much fun going through the challenges and exploring every possibility to each finely crafted level. Nothing is more satisfying than setting up these massive simultaneous attacks that make you feel like a proper ninja. My only real complaint is it's not long enough, with only 12 real levels and only one of them you have control all the characters. Although I've still put probably 60 hours into it by now doing challenges and just replaying levels different ways. The story is decent but not the reason to buy the game, theres even english and japanese voice acting which is both done really well. Even at full price I bet most people would get their money's worth out of this title for sure.

If you ever played commandos-like games, this is the right game for you. Everything you like in similar games is here, well suited and wrapped in ninja setting. Epic soundtrack, epic story of friends from the very different worlds, yet all of them are solid characters well written, playing their roles above the class. Totally recommend this game for anyone who know this genre or those who want to discover it for the first time. Worth much more than they ask for it, trust me.