Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun
Staying alive by tapping F5
$39.99 Developer Mimimi Productions, mimimi-productions.de Requirements OS X 10.10, Intel dual-core processor, 4GB RAM, Nvidia 9800 GTX, AMD Radeon HD 7770, 1GB VRAM
Set in Edo Japan, each stage in Shadow Tactics is a sprawling diorama of twisting alleys, fortified courtyards, and soaring pagodas, brimming with curious guards and stern watchmen. Shadow Tactics is a stealth game in the old style – there’s nothing innovative about skirting cones representing sightlines or dragging corpses out of sight. Not one member of your five-man team is particularly suited to brawling, and Shadow Tactics requires a hermetic devotion to staying hidden.
The internal clockwork that governs what enemies see, hear, and react to is hard-nosed but judiciously fair. Sightlines are affected by height and brush, and it takes practice to learn how to hide in plain sight. There’s a fine line between raising suspicions and raising a red flag, but killing is noisy, messy work.
The flashiest thing about Shadow Tactics is “Shadow Mode,” which queues simultaneous actions for each member of your squad – with careful planning, you can dispatch an entire
room with one keystroke. Still, the legacy of real-time stealth games lives on, especially in its liberal use of quicksaving. Successfully goaded an ox into kicking a passing soldier to death? F5 to save. Cut down where you stand by a snarling, armored samurai? F8 to reload. Quick-saving encourages players to experiment (and fail) freely. With that safety nets comes the freedom to approach Shadow Tactics’ challenges, large and small, as you see fit.
the bottom line. Shadow Tactics feels considered and hand-crafted, at once an homage to – and a path forward for – the best in stealth gaming. Joseph Leray