Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun
Shadow tactics: stand by wall with sun behind you
FROM A ROOFTOP, you see it all. The guards move in predictable patterns, their vision cones making it explicit what they can and can’t see. Your samurai partner is in some bushes just behind a guard and his officer, though neither is looking in his direction. Up high across the map, a sniper awaits your command. All you have to do is spin the winch, and a crane will drop its load on three guards, while your samurai cuts down his two, and the sniper drops the remaining witness. They carry out their orders simultaneously, and there’s nothing left to stop you entering the next area.
ShadowT actics’ name reveals its purpose. A top-down stealth game, rendered in a lovely, painterly style, it’s probably not pushing your GPU as hard as Dishonored2 would, but taxes the wetware between your ears just as much. Its world is one of predictable patterns and overlapping attention spans. Opportunities overlap, coalesce, and dissolve as you watch, until you judge the moment is right to strike.
With up to five characters under your control, attacks can get complex. You can use your heroes one at a time, but entering Shadow Mode allows you to set up moves in advance, which are then carried out at the press of a key, and this can lead to perfectly timed ambushes or, more likely, abject failure. So load and have another go. The game absolutely encourages you to quicksave, even going as far as assigning it a button on the controller, if you’re using one. It nags you if you’ve spent as much as an entire minute without saving, but only offers your last three saves for reloading. This makes it a game in which trial and error are the way forward, but one that’s not going to punish you too badly for making the latter, despite its occasionally punishing difficulty level.
It may be set in Edo-period Japan, with shogun, samurai, and shinobi taking major roles, but ShadowTactics evokes a later period in world history and an earlier one in videogames: the WWII-set Commandos games. This isn’t a bad thing, as it’s always good to see fresh ideas pumped into a stale genre. It’s been 14 years since Commandos 3: Destination Berlin, which now sounds rather like a movie portraying a bachelor party, in which someone thinks it’s hilarious to dress up as a Nazi, rather than a gritty wartime tactics game.
In doing this, ShadowTactics feels like something new, even if it’s just the latest point on a line that stretches back to the original Syndicate. It would be easy to imagine this harsh but mostly fair game in third-person, àlaHitman, but we’re glad it’s remained the way it has.
VERDICT8Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun
LIGHT Engaging tactical gameplay; appropriate art style; simple control scheme.
DARK Can obscure the way ahead; animations rely too much on bobbing heads; quicksaving may annoy purists.
RECOMMENDED SPECS Intel i3 fourth-gen 3.5GHz or AMD quad-core 3.9GHz; 6GB RAM; Nvidia GTX 570 or AMD Radeon HD 6950.