Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun

Desperados is the game that came to my mind when I first saw this game (I never played Commandos). It has a beautiful and varied level design, matching music (though not as suspenseful, admittedly) and a decent voice cast. Each character has a unique and useful skillset and play style. There is a solid foundation here that easily matches Desperados. Shadow Tactics even does a couple of things better. You will unlock the characters quickly. The save system is done well. Up to three quick-save states are kept. After a short time, a timer button will appear at the top that lets you save with a click, reminding you to save repeatedly. Three characters have grappling hooks to climb buildings and can jump from roof to roof. Night levels play differently, as light sources affect line-of-sight. There is also an achievement system that rewards certain play styles. However, there are many things I did not like. There is no way to incapacitate people beyond knocking them out for half a minute. Civilians will sometimes stay put afterwards, but often cause trouble. This discourages a non-lethal play style. Some of the later levels are extremely tedious, because many people will be in each other’s line-of-sight or standing together, making it difficult to find an entry. At some point, it became too much of a puzzle game for me, as I felt though there were only few options available. Thus you will reload often! Samurais are best avoided, because it is not possible to dispose of them silently. Only one character can kill them safely on their own. They ignore distractions and can see through disguises from a distance. They just weren’t fun and become more numerous. There is also no way to chain commands of a single character. You can only execute one command for multiple characters at once. The game would have benefitted from a pause mode too. Finally, the controls can be clunky sometimes. It is a decent game and worth having a look, but it doesn’t live up to my expectations.

I have the member berries for the Commandos games and Desperados from my childhood. Not many games made like this being made and I was extremely excited. Positives first: art style and presentation is top notch, the game is beautiful. Sound is pretty good, music is good, voice over work ranges from ok (narrator) to incredible (yuki). Gameplays is solid and is pretty much what you would expect the above mentioned games. This game is a clear homage and does not try to reinvent the wheel, but rather make a modern version of that old style gameplay. The game is in 3d and this allows you to rotate the camera at will and look at things from different angles, which is a major innovation for this specific style of game (at least for me). The enemy AI is decent. Story is ok with some great, haunting moments, though easily and immediately predictable at the same time (the identity of the main villian). Negatives: this would have been a 5/5 for me it wasn't mired by some incredibly annoying issues. The 3d rotating camera creates problems quite frequently with the game not being able to reliably tell where you want to click from certain sharp angles (terrible for a game relying on precision). View cones/sight lines are straight up broken at times. My major peeve comes from the decision not to include the option to tie up enemies once you knock them out. One of the devs explained on a forum on Steam that its because "there would basically be no difference between killing and no killing runs and we want the game to be much more challenging on no kill runs". This completely ruined immersion for me. Without spoilers there's a mission where you have to infiltrate your allies' camp while they consider you an enemy and naturally I did not want to kill anyone. The game becomes stupidly, insanely frustrating as enemies wake up about 30 seconds after being knocked out and you have to stupidly keep punching them again and again. No tying up could have been one of the achievement badges.

Shadow Tactics is a game brimming with quality around every corner. Each mission is a challenging but fair puzzle where you have to make clever use of the limited range of abilities available to your characters, carefully planning your approach to each situation. There is a great deal of trial and error involved here, but the quicksave/quickload function means failure is never the end. The story may not be super engaging, but the characters are all well written and voice acted. Listening to their banter during missions really adds to the overall experience while sneaking through the game's well-designed and pretty-looking environments. Highly recommended.

If you spent hours playing Commandos, Desperados or Robin Hood in the old days, just buy this game. If you did't, but you like tactics and stealth, buy it. Perfect, challenging, satysfying and gorgeous piece of gaming experience.

Commandos gameplay with more friendlier controls and tweaks. I recommeded it not only to strategists but even to non-hardcore players who find Commandos too hard or slow. Domo arigato MIMIMI.