Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun

This game resurrects a long lost genre of the real time tactics stealth game. The shining examples up to this point were Desperados and Commandos 2. I think it might be better than both of these. It's definitely up there. Great art, fantastic gameplay, good characters too. The levels are enormous and fun. Can't recommend this hard enough.

If you like Commandos 1,2 and 3 than this game you must have!!!!.

One of the best tactical game I've played. Great soundtrack, gorgeous graphics, great story, Japanese voices (so good !). It's just in my top 3 of this year.

ST:BofT is, pretty much, Desperados but inspired by Samurai epics, rather then westerns. You get to control 5 characters, each with their own abilities, and you are tasks with levels to stealth-through. This is not quite a puzzle game – outside tutorials there aren’t set answers – what you get are problems and tools to solve those problems. UI, rules and overall gameplay is really well put together, which is important in Real-Time game. Camera can be a bit of a nuisance, but it’s a minor annoyance, one you will get quickly used to. What I was really impressed by was the character design of ST. In Desperados1 all of the characters had strongly defined roles. In ST there is more overlapm while still keeping them distinct – most of the characters can stab enemies and drag the bodies, and all of them have their own form of distraction. The brilliant part is that all of them work differently, encouraging synergy and creative use of those skills. There is no “best body carrier” for example – they all have their uses in different scenarios. That leads to another clever design – all character are introduced really quickly into the game. But to keep things interesting, the game switches what characters are at your disposal on per-mission basis. That allows for unique scenarios, as well as preventing player from getting stuck, trying to solve every problem with a character they are most familiar with. And when they get to play with a full roster, they know very well what they have on their disposal. I was also impressed by the narrative. It is not an award winning epic, but there was clearly an effort put into creating a coherent story with believable character motivations, with some decent character arcs for our main heroes. I must also commend Mimimi games for the post release support. When I played the game on release, I could barely run it, with all settings on low. Now the game runs smoothly with all settings on high.

Long time since I haven't played a stealth tactical game like this. It's simply a gem, and the ninja setting fits perfectly with the genre