Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun

When started the game it seemed a bit boring. Only after a few hours in the game you get the taste of all the tactics and actions variety. Totally licked it

Loved playing this game. It's great to play again the Commandos style game. I hope for a Sequel :)

Essentially Desperados or Commandos 2 set in early 17th Century Japan. Like those games you control a set of characters with different abilities whom you utilise to work your way through a level crammed with enemies to achieve a set of goals, while quicksaving your game after nearly every action you take. The character's abilities allow for a different approaches to be taken depending on the obstacle to be overcome. The solution, however, will always be stealth or ambush. There is no forgiveness for direct attacks in this game as you will always be heavily outnumbered. While different approaches are possible, the game mechanics essentially boil down to watching the movements and zone of sight of enemies, avoiding them and moving into position to perform a sneak attack or ambush. Levels may also contain situations you can utilise to your advantage, a falling crate for example, but these are few and far between, leading to monotonous gameplay within a few levels. The difficulty is further increased by spawning additional enemies if you are discovered. Many of which station themselves in the exact same positions as the enemies you've just cleared. Personally, I found this game to be tediously difficult, even on the easiest setting, and little more than a grind of sneak attack after sneak attack interspersed by almost as many quicksaves and quickloads. Gameplay was further marred by unresponsive controls using mouse click options, for example selecting a sword attack, often not working to the detriment of the character and resulting in yet another quickload. Keyboard actions did, however, work every time. In summary, this is a well constructed game with some simple yet effective game mechanics. Unfortunately for me, the difficulty and constant need to reload after an action went awry made it an ultimately an unenjoyable experience.

A story about feudal Japan told in multiple missions. There's a nice amount of dialogue and an actual plot with a tad character development, which is actually more than I expected from the genre. The gameplay will give you what you expect. Many missions look impossible at first glance, but the game is a very fair challenge. Even though you might find yourself tacking a specific situation half a dozen times before it works out, a handy quick save/load feature means that even a dozen attempts won't take too long, so you'll have a steady flow of progress, making the game enjoyable, while feeling like you earned your successes, The levels are relatively straight forward, not offering widely varying paths, even if they do leave you a choice between to approaches now and then. But this never feels like a problem, as what's there is entertaining. The only downside I could mention is that the graphics could be better, but they're not ugly by any means. The world is nicely designed, both in visuals and in tone of the story, painting a stylish Renaissance Japan without being too melodramatic or excentric. I personally would also like more complex levels or skills, but at the same time I never felt that anything was actually lacking while gaming. So all criticisms boil down to: "I want MORE of this", and if this is all that's to complain about a game, it clearly has earned its 5 stars. I hope we'll see a sequel some day.

I thoroughly enjoyed the gameplay experience. Beautiful level design. Objectives vary, clever ways of solving obstacles can usually be spotted on the go, likable main characters. At least for me the feudal japan setting was a novelty in real-time strategy games. Looking forward to replay my favorite missions on different difficulty levels!