Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun

If Commandos and Tenchu had a lovechild, this would be it!

Pretty good game, works perfectly on Mac. However, there is one thing I didn't like: [some other games] advertising in the main menu. Usually when I pay money for [online] product I expect to get it ad-free.

Everything polished about this game is in the graphics. The rest is mid. The story , just there. Mechanics are strictly contextual , everything is defined by contraints rather than possibilities to the point that you'll find yourself quicksaving/loading on repeat. Don't bother.

It's a strange game. It starts nice and easy, the story is interesting, the characters are good and fun to use, the difficulty goes up steadily, which is good for a while. Then you get to the last missions, specially the very last one. Things become an extremely annoying puzzle with pretty much no freedom, you need to save and load countless times until you get the exact timing that they intended for the absurd amount of patrols and sight cones in your way. All the fun I was having turned slowly into annoyance, and by the end into abhorrence. I like my stealth and kinda hard games, but this is an exercise in frustration, not to mention the depressing details here and there, makes me think some of the devs may have mental issues. Only for masochists and bragging masters who don't mind the save scumming. Next time, make an actual game that doesn't rely in time travel because in a normal world you're asking something unreasonable from players to extend playtime in the most artificial way.

So this is a game I was only slightly interested in, and it just happened to be in the $25 bundle with Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Battle Chasers: Nightwar. After playing about an hour I'm disappointed and baffled. I'm not really sure how this game has so much praise and so few people being critical of it. I understand why it might appeal to a niche of squad tactics fans who enjoyed games like Commandos, but that doesn't explain the universal acclaim it's gotten. The controls are clunky and unintuitive, whenever I want to move the camera it feels like a wrestling match, and worst of all, it's not even really a stealth game. This is a puzzle game where you mash F5 and F8 to trial-and-error your way through puzzles. I was hoping for an interesting blend of stealth and tactics, but the "stealth" and "tactics" actually present seem to be pretty much surface level. With all that said, I don't hate this game. Like I said, I can understand why it might appeal to a niche, but the amount of universal praise it's gotten is undeserved, in my opinion.