Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun

I don't even like stealth games but I really liked this one. My only critique is a technical one: the Mac version is not 64 bit, meaning it will stop working with a future macOS update. For such a recent game (2016) that's kind of difficult to excuse. Luckily it will still work on Windows.

This game has incredibly dystopian eye tracking on by default and you have to go into settings and disable it. Considering that this game has a super deluxe version that costs over 60 dollars, the developers have shown that they are willing to do whatever it takes to make extra money, I wouldn't be surprised if eye tracking is on by default so they can sell that data to advertisers. I'd recommend this game if you want a corporation to have direct access to your face and house via your computer's cameras, if that doesn't sound very appealing to you then I'd recommend avoiding this bit of spyware. The company that created the eye tracking software openly admits in their cookies section that they sell your personal information for profit and seemingly have no way to opt out of it. Avoid this dystopian software.

So.. the graphics and over the top tactics seem cool in the first levels but then everything becomes extremely hard and quite frustrating. This is a game made especially to waste your time with waiting and waiting and waiting and then some quick actions. Shame the nice japanese action is weirded out with some english voice acting that do not fit. All in all this game is unnecessary hard and quite repetitive along the story line. Meh..

I am not sure why everyone is so hyped up about this game. I waited to review this until I completed the game. PROS: There are multiple ways to complete most missions. Each character has unique skills and levels have multiple achievements you can obtain. So there WOULD be replayability to play this game. CONS: However, the game has several problems with it. Line of sight on enemies is broken at time. Enemies who shouldn't be able to see you can and cones can change at times indiscriminately out of established cycles. Also you have two types of civilians, friendly and hostile. You end up killing several of them due to how annoying they are. Terrain can also can draw attention to you even if you weren't trying. Controls can be annoying at times depending on how frequently you are cycling through the characters. Normal level is pretty much expert mode. Not sure why they have a hardcore mode. No need. I know it sounds like I am complaining about the difficulty but keep this in mind. You can get achievements on normal or hardcore mode. After defeating the game GOG awarded me killing the final boss achievement. Only 13.2% of players have obtained this achievement.

Controlling one character is easy, and fine. Controlling two, moving together is pretty manageable. It just doens't work for me when I need to control two characters needing to do two seperate actions chains at the same time. You can relatively easily set it up for your characters to do two seperate *actions* at the same time using the shadow mode. The problem arises when you need to do anything more complicated. The inability to reassign numbers to each character means you can't just go 1-2 1-2 1-2 swapping between two characters. You have to go 1-3? 2?-3 2-3 2-3 2-3, as you break muscle memory from prior levels. The game's just a little imprecise when it comes to selectign targets partially obscured by objects. It's just all the little thing build up very quickly. Frustrating controls are a problem in a lot of genres, but they are crippling stealth games where you are asked to walk along a razors edge.