It’s taken me the better part of a year to get around to Desperados 3. This may seem a little odd given how much I liked Shadow Tactics, the previous game from Desperados 3 developers Mimimi; however, there’s a few reasons for that, first and foremost of which is that, historically, I haven’t liked Westerns as a setting for videogames. I’ve played a few across a range of different genres — Red Dead Redemption, Call Of Juarez: Gunslinger and Hard West are the ones which immediately spring to mind — none of which struck me as being particularly bad, but none of which I managed to stick with for more than a few hours. This is strange because I am quite a big fan of movie Westerns, particularly anything from Sergio Leone, but I can never take them seriously when they’re transplanted into a videogame; matching the mechanics to the setting is always a sufficiently contrived process that I end up feeling like I’m wandering around inside a knockoff version of Westworld and quit shortly afterwards.

This is why I never took the time to go back and play the original Desperados games, and it’s a big part of why I’ve dragged my feet on installing Desperados 3¹ until now. I’m glad I did though, because now that I’ve finished it I’ve realised two things:

• It is possible to make a decent Western-themed videogame which doesn’t have to contort itself into unusual shapes to fit into whatever the genre du jour is, which conclusively proves that the problem doesn’t lie with the setting.
• If I’d actually bothered to play it last year, Desperados 3 would have been a serious contender for my GOTY 2020².

It’s probably stating the obvious to say that Desperados 3 bears rather more than a passing resemblance to its predecessor Shadow Tactics. This was always going to be the case; none of the real-time tactics games that came out of that weird little genre mini-boom after Commandos were drastically different from one another. They all used intricate networks of patrolling guards, oscillating vision cones, and punishing alert systems to create a series of puzzle box levels that your five-member team would have to unpick with whatever tools were at their disposal; the fact that said team could range anywhere from a disposable set of Starfleet redshirts in Away Team to a selection of Merry Men in Robin Hood was, effectively, just window dressing around the same core mechanics. It’s those mechanics that Shadow Tactics almost flawlessly updated back in 2016, and I was hardly expecting Desperados 3 to throw away all of that good work. It has the same interface improvements, the same concept of near/far guard vision and bushes and cliffs obscuring enemy views, and the same ability to issue orders to multiple team members while paused to synchronise guard kills, here rebranded as Showdown Mode. It’s not surprising that Desperados 3 lifts all of these basic mechanical tweaks and innovations almost verbatim  — in fact, it’s something that’s in fine keeping with the traditions of the old real-time tactics genre, however short-lived it might have been.

(This is why I’m not going to waste time in this review explaining the basic mechanics of Desperados 3 — I explained them four years ago in my Shadow Tactics review, so if you want to know the fundamentals of how the game works you’re better off reading that.)

What is surprising, however, is just how literally Desperados 3 copies and pastes what I considered to be the more Shadow Tactics-specific ingredients of that game. For example, in Shadow Tactics the first character you get is Hayako, a ninja who can scale cliffs using vines, who can distract people by throwing rocks, and who can kill guards by either stabbing them at close range with a tanto or by lobbing a shuriken into their neck at medium range. In Desperados 3, the first character you get is Cooper, a cowboy who can scale cliffs using vines, who can distract people by throwing coins, and who can kill guards by either stabbing them at close range with a knife or by throwing that same knife into their neck at medium range. Shadow Tactics has Aiko, a female character who can put on a disguise to pass unnoticed through enemy areas and who can distract guards by flirting with them; she can also throw bottles of sneezing potion to blind guards for brief periods. Desperados 3 has Kate, a female character who can put on a disguise to pass unnoticed through enemy areas and who can distract guards by flirting with them; she can also throw bottles of perfume to blind guards for brief periods. All of the character archetypes from Shadow Tactics make a similar return, albeit with some rearranged abilities: just like Shadow Tactics’ Mugen, Hector is the big guy who can kill Samurai — sorry, I mean Longcoats, in a single hit from his melee weapon and who can carry two dead bodies at once, but he’s given up his decoy item to the sniper character, Doctor McCoy. In exchange he’s stolen the whistle-and-trap combo from Yuki, who has been remixed into Desperado 3’s single new(ish) character, Isabelle; just like Yuki she can scale cliffs and has also swiped the sniper’s pet decoy (although it’s a cat rather than a tanooki), but her other two abilities are entirely new. She’s very much the exception, however; the names and faces might be different, but all of the other characters and abilities function pretty much identically to their Shadow Tactics equivalents.

So my initial impression was that this wasn’t so much Desperados 3 as it was Shadow Tactics: Wild West Edition. To say this was unexpected would be an understatement, as I had assumed that the point of getting the Desperados license was to make a Desperados game, and given that the characters had been lifted directly from Shadow Tactics I got to wondering how Desperados 3 could possibly resemble either of the previous Desperados games at all. Fortunately for me I do try and do the bare minimum of research before calling a game out for being lazy or derivative; in this case said research consisted of watching half an hour of a Desperados longplay on Youtube, during which I discovered — to my considerable surprise — that that the characters and abilities from Desperados 1 are themselves damn near identical to the ones in Shadow Tactics. Sure, there’s a little bit of mechanical drift thanks to the various changes that Shadow Tactics made to the basic real-time tactics formula, but Cooper’s got his knife which he can use to either stab or throw and can climb cliffs; Doc McCoy has his sniper rifle and his gas grenades; and Kate has her disguise, her two distraction abilities and even a blind ability, although in Desperados 1 it’s a mirror rather than a bottle of perfume.

After giving it some thought I’ve concluded that this weird convergence isn’t really the fault of either game, it’s just that introducing genuinely new abilities into a real-time tactics game is really difficult without smashing up the basic structure that makes these games so compelling in the first place. It’s not so much that Desperados 3 overly resembles Shadow Tactics, or that Shadow Tactics overly resembles Desperados 1, but rather that all of them have been reluctant to move too far away from the gameplay concepts established by genre progenitor Commandos back in 1998 — after all, Commandos has a sniper character, a character who can disguise and distract guards, a decoy ability and so on. It’s not like Desperados 3 doesn’t try to innovate, as Isabelle’s new abilities are straight out of Dishonored 2: she can temporarily mind control enemies to move them out of position or even get them to kill their friends, and she can also magically link two guards so that whatever happens to one of them happens to the other, whether that’s being blinded, distracted or outright killed³. These abilities have exactly the same potential for excellent emergent bullshit as the ones in Dishonored — for example, it’s entirely possible to link an unaware guard to a nearby chicken, and then kill the guard by killing the chicken — which makes them a lot of fun and I very much appreciate their inclusion in the game. However, they’re also arguably overpowered, as Isabelle is often able to combine her abilities to single-handedly clear huge swathes of enemies out of a level while the rest of the team sits around a rock playing cards. Desperados 3 is very smart and just about manages to keep her contained with some excellent level design and guard placement, but it goes to show that this kind of experimentation runs the serious risk of breaking the teamwork paradigm that the real-time tactics genre relies on. It’s understandable that Mimimi mostly prefer to play it safe and stick to tried-and-tested genre norms, especially when they’ve already had a full game’s worth of practice with them in Shadow Tactics.

But this then raises the following question: what reason is there to buy Desperados 3 if it’s “just” a reskinned version of Shadow Tactics? This is perfectly fine if that’s what you want, of course, but if you’re a fan of real-time tactics games you probably already bought Desperados 3 and don’t need me to convince you. Well, there’s a few reasons, first and foremost of which is that Western theming. It’s really good, drawing from the entire spectrum of Westerns over the last sixty years — Desperados 3 is heavily influenced by Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns, which explains why I like it so much, but there’s also a bit of Tombstone, a bit of Unforgiven, a bit of Deadwood, even a reference to the Westworld TV show which doesn’t fall completely flat. The look of the thing is perfect, mixing muddy frontier towns with sun-bleached deserts and Louisiana wetlands. (Yes, there’s a swamp level in Desperados 3, but it defies expectations by being one of the best levels in the game.) What I found particularly impressive this time around is how the visual style had been pitched just right so that the levels always looked like gorgeous miniatures, essentially fully 3D versions of the intricate pre-rendered 2D art that comprised the originals’ backdrops. There’s just so much detail crammed into each one — one level near the start has you blowing up a wooden railway bridge, which is something of a shame because it looks like every single plank and beam in the bridge has been manually tweezered into place by some long-suffering 3D artist. The hand-built nature of the levels, and the fact that there’s very little copy-pasting of things that should be noticeably unique like buildings and signage, makes every one of Desperado 3’s levels pop out of the screen in a way that very few games manage these days.

The production values in general are a noticeable step up from Shadow Tactics, which was itself no slouch in this department; the very first thing you see in the game is a man riding up to a fountain in a desert and getting off his horse, and I was astounded at how good the animations for this were. They’re lifelike enough that they’re probably mocapped, but I can’t believe a small studio like Mimimi went to that kind of trouble for this, and their integration into the game is flawless. The character work is similarly excellent — again, this is something that Shadow Tactics already did really well but which Desperados 3 improves upon in every way. Each of the five team members has a palpable sense of personality helped along by excellent voice acting and some great writing, and each character’s voice responses upon being selected and ordered around change depending on what the level is and what’s going on in the story at the time, which is a great touch. The overall plot is nothing special, being… ah, inspired, shall we say, by Once Upon A Time In The West, but thanks to the animations, the writing and the voicework it’s impeccably well-told. It’s also helped along immensely by the soundtrack, which is absolutely superb; at first it doesn’t seem all that special despite being a nice distillation of the various movie Western soundtracks we’ve been graced with throughout the years, but the more I listened to it the more I came to appreciate how it was layering in various instruments and motifs that you wouldn’t necessarily expect from a Western, but which absolutely fit the kind of game Desperados 3 is.

Most importantly of all, though, the real-time tactics genre is one of the few where the game mechanics don’t have to bend over backwards to support a Western premise. It’s a setting where we’re already very accustomed to a small band of misfits teaming up to accomplish a bank heist or a train robbery or defending small Mexican villages, and these concepts can be lifted and dropped straight into Desperados 3 with just a little bit of tweaking to make them fit narratively. The best use of the setting is on Desperados 3 worst level, oddly enough; it’s the inevitably-tedious level where all of your guns and tools are taken away and you have to do the whole thing with non-lethal abilities. The gloss the game puts on it is pretty fun nonetheless: Cooper and the gang got blackout drunk during a night out on the town and come to in the morning with a town’s worth of angry guards looking to have words with them about all of the criminal damage they caused while they were living it up. The level starts you off with Hector, who has misplaced his (lethal) bear trap and has to make do with a (non-lethal) rake; the rest of the team can be found passed out at various points around the level and have to be woken up by Hector before they can continue. The voice actors have a lot of fun with the hungover voice lines, with Kate’s responses to being asked to flirt with guards being a particular highlight, and as you move through the town you can see the detritus left behind from their all-night bender. Taking all of your fun toys away for a level is something videogames really like to do for some reason; I’ve hated it every time I’ve come across it and Desperados 3 is ultimately no exception, but the theming almost made it tolerable and it’s used to similar effect throughout the rest of Desperados 3.

And of course because this is a Western-set game it lets the designers come up with a far more nuanced take on firearm usage. Shadow Tactics took a rather blunt force approach to them, handing every character an identical matchlock pistol with three shots that was mostly used for taking out Samurai when Mugen was otherwise occupied. Desperados 3 also gives every character a firearm (except for Isabelle, who is OP enough without one) but goes to the additional trouble of making each character’s guns match their playstyle:

• Cooper gets two revolvers, which can be fired separately at two separate targets. This is surprisingly difficult to use effectively because the revolvers are the noisiest ability in the game and so it’ll draw a lot of unwanted attention unless you happen to be shooting at the last two guards in the area, in which case you have about fifteen other abilities you can use to dispatch them more easily. Still, Cooper already has his knife for a ranged attack, and so the revolvers are more intended to be used in Showdown mode to sync up with the rest of the team and take down half a dozen guards at once — the revolvers being noisy is less of a problem if everyone in the sound radius is also in the middle of being stabbed or shot by somebody else.
• Kate gets a derringer, which despite its small size is no less deadly than Cooper’s revolvers. It has a short range but also has an absolutely tiny noise radius and can be used for stealth kills; Kate needs it, however, because she doesn’t have any other way of permanently killing guards — she can stun them temporarily by kicking them in the groin, but they’ll eventually recover unless another character is on hand to tie them up while they’re down.
• Doc McCoy gets his sniper revolver, which has a massive range and barely makes any noise. Tends to be used for taking out people in guard towers or otherwise lurking somewhere high up that makes them awkward to get to, but just as good at close range if you feel like using it that way.
• Hector gets a shotgun, which isn’t used against single targets but instead cuts down everything in a short-range area-of-effect cone. It’s almost as noisy as Cooper’s revolvers, but this doesn’t matter so much for the shotgun because if you’re using it the chances are you’ve gone loud anyway and are using it to kill four, five or even six guards at once while they’re all clustered around a dead body.

This last point is key: unlike a lot of stealth games, and unlike Shadow Tactics in particular, triggering an alert doesn’t necessarily lead to an immediate reload. An alert will spawn additional guards, but there’s a finite number of guard reinforcements and if you play your cards right you can win the ensuing gun battle — and it’ll even make the rest of the level easier, because you’ll have cleared out all of the nearby guards and can fast-forward to the next bit. All guns have limited ammo but there’s chests with reloads scattered throughout every level so the game clearly wants you to be using them, and there’s also a higher prevalence of healing abilities available in the team that gives you a considerable amount of sustain during a fight — Isabelle has a self-heal, Doc has bandages that can heal any character, and Hector has whiskey that he can drink to heal himself up to full health in one go. You still can’t shoot your way through an entire level, but if a particularly difficult arrangement of guards is giving you too much trouble to do the stealthy way it’s now entirely possible — not to mention extremely cathartic — to brute force it with a classic Western shootout⁴. And possibly the smartest thing Desperados 3 does here is that it doesn’t judge. It’s not handing out Silent Assassin ratings or tracking how many people you kill on a Chaos meter or anything like that; all it cares about is that you complete the mission objectives. It doesn’t care about how, which makes Desperados 3 a truly freeform game that sees both ghosting a level and tackling it with an unhealthy degree of homicidal violence as equally valid approaches.

Honestly, there’s a lot of smart thinking and good design packed into Desperados 3, and it’s all executed with extremely high production values and a level of polish that I rarely see from AAA games, let alone a game from a mid-size studio like Mimimi. It’s so good, in fact, that I’m struggling to think of anything wrong with it at all; aside from the no-guns level — which I’ll concede is more of a pet peeve on my part than it is an actual problem with the game — the only thing I can really haul it up on is that the single action Showdown Mode lets you queue up is often not enough when you want to be doing four or five actions in rapid sequence with a single character, and the controls are nowhere near precise enough to handle that kind of fast input. I made a similar criticism of Shadow Tactics and it’s disappointing that nothing has been done to address it for Desperados 3, even if it is only really a problem towards the very end of the game when the guard layouts are at their most complex.  It’s also a little disappointing that Desperados 3 isn’t really trying to take the real-time tactics genre anywhere new — but then why would it need to, when it’s refined the existing formula into a state of near-perfection? It’s consistently entertaining and always engaging, flawlessly combining all of the best aspects of strategy and puzzle games into something that made it genuinely difficult to stop myself from completing each hour-long level in a single sitting. It’s not like there’s anyone else operating in the real-time tactics space, either⁵; this gives Mimimi plenty of room to keep iterating like this for as long as there’s an audience for it, and I hope they continue to do so for years to come.

The post Thoughts: Desperados 3 appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Back in 1998 a small Spanish developer called Pyro Studios released the first Commandos game. Commandos was a strategy game with a difference: instead of jumping on the Command & Conquer RTS bandwagon that was trundling along at full speed at around about this time, Commandos was instead a World War 2-set Mission Impossible-style series of infiltration missions where you took command of a small squad of 4-6 Allied operatives as they blew up various bits of critical German infrastructure and assassinated key personnel. It was a game notable for the massive strength asymmetry between your squad and the opposing forces — each level was infested with dozens and dozens of guards and your commandos were unfortunately rather realistically squishy, quickly succumbing to just a couple of rifle bullets — which in turn engendered an extreme focus on stealth and on using the unique toolkits available to each individual commando to unpick the enemy patrol paths so that you could reach your objective.

Commandos was successful enough that it spawned its own real-time tactics sub-genre. As well as two sequels (Commandos 2 arguably perfected the formula, while Commandos 3 was a bit of a cash-in from a studio that was running out of ideas and talent), it inspired two Desperados games, Robin Hood: Legend of Sherwood and even Star Trek: Away Team. But then a funny thing happened: after the initial rush of imitators, this particular strain of stealthy strategy game died an abrupt and premature death. Save for Desperados 2 in 2006, nobody has made a Commandos-style game in almost fifteen years.

That is, until Shadow Tactics was released last month. And oh my goodness, it is Commandos to the core.

Shadow Tactics is a huge surprise in so many ways. First, it’s arrived almost completely unannounced – I track gaming news like a hawk, and I’d never even heard of it until about a week before the demo came out. Second, it’s resurrecting a genre that’s been dead for over a decade. And third is that, given that it’s trying to not only bring the genre back to life but also update it for the modern era, it has absolutely no right to be as good as it is. Shadow Tactics is not without its flaws, but playing it makes me feel like there were another 10 years of Commandos games released that I somehow wasn’t aware of and that it’s building upon almost seamlessly.

Shadow Tactics continues the fine genre tradition of visiting different time periods and places by being set in post-Sengoku Jidai era Japan. The Shogun is overseeing a period of peace following the wars that gained him the title, but not everyone is happy with this state of affairs and there is a conspiracy afoot to unseat him; as the Shogun is aware of this, he brings in your band of covert operatives to unmask the conspirators. Shadow Tactics works with a comparatively small team roster of five, and it’s extremely rare that you’ll get to work with all five at once in the same mission; most missions have one or more characters being unavailable for some plot-convenient reason and you having to do without their skills and tools for the duration. The team is made up of:

• Mugen the Samurai, who fulfils the Green Beret role of being an extremely burly man whose main job is to stab people. He has a sake bottle that he can place within view of a guard to attract them to a more convenient spot for the stabbing, as well as a Sword Wind ability that lets him stab up to three guards at once.

• Yuki the Thief, a teenage girl who probably ends up killing more people than Mugen. This is thanks to her Little Trap, which can be placed somewhere out of the way, and her Bird’s Voice flute-thing that allows her to attract guards towards the trap. Which then kills them instantly by firing a spike upwards into their groin.

• Hayato the Shinobi, whose most useful non-sword piece of equipment is “a rock”. It’s not even a special rock; he just throws it to briefly divert the attention of any guards who hear it clattering to the ground. He also gets a Shuriken to take guards out at range, however anyone hit with it expires in an extremely protracted and noisy fashion that’s guaranteed to attract notice if there’s anyone nearby so it’s less useful than it sounds.

• Aiko the… Spy Lady? She can use disguises (which must always be obtained from the map somewhere, because she apparently never thinks to pack her geisha things ahead of time) to pass unnoticed, and she can also engage guards in conversation to distract them. Her Sneezing Powder ability lets her dramatically reduce the vision range of guards for a brief period, allowing other team members to slip by unseen.

• Takumi the Sniper, and all-around baller old man. He’s got a wooden leg that doubles as an ammunition-limited silenced sniper rifle, a collection of bombs that will indiscriminately murder anyone within a wide radius¹, and — best of all — an actual honest-to-god tanuki called Kuma who acts like the radio decoy from Commandos: send Kuma out to a nice spot and then activate him, and he’ll roll around on his back and generally act like a cute little bastard that nearby guards cannot resist petting. Then you stab them in the back while they’re fluffing his belly.

All of the team bar Takumi get a bog-standard melee attack (Takumi’s sniper rifle functions as his primary attack), and everyone also eventually gets a matchlock pistol with three shots; this is loud, but the sound radius is slightly smaller than the pistol’s range so if you take advantage of good positioning it can be really useful for getting rid of particularly annoying guards. The characters are differentiated somewhat in how they can move around the map, as the three lighter characters (Yuki, Hayato and Aiko) can clamber up and down vines and use grappling hooks to take advantage of alternate routes, but Mugen (because of his armour) and Takumi (because of his leg) are restricted to using ladders. They get other benefits though: Mugen is strong enough to pick up giant boulders and throw them at groups of enemies, instakilling them and making it look like an accident, while Takumi… well, he’s got a gun and he’s got Kuma, which already makes him arguably OP.

Many levels are therefore built around infiltrating a compound with your more mobile characters so that they can clear guards out of the way of Mugen and/or Takumi, who are critical to bypass other obstacles later on. Said obstacles almost always consist of groups of guards, and there are three types: bog standard guards who behave exactly as you would expect guards to; straw hat guards who are not distracted by rocks/bird noises/cute tanukis and who are commensurately more difficult to eliminate; and finally Samurai, who are just a massive pain in the ass. They can see through Aiko’s disguises and their armour makes them impervious to melee attacks from everyone except Mugen, who can take them on in a classic samurai duel. Everyone else has to stun them with a firearm first and then run in to finish them off with a quick stab – except because stunned samurai always turn to face the direction of the shot and will start unloading their pistols at anyone who enters their vision range, this often requires teamwork as one character shoots and another does the stabbing when the samurai turns away.

As in all Commandos-alikes, guard vision range (and how your team can evade it) is probably the single most important mechanic in the game. Right-click on any guard and you can see their vision cone sweeping from left to right and back again as they patrol whatever compound you’re currently trying to sneak into. Guards can see quite a long way, but their vision cones are split into two distinct ranges: a light green area that denotes close range, in which they will see you no matter what you’re doing, and a dark green, hatched area that represents long range. Long range is where 90% of the action happens in Shadow Tactics, as guards cannot see you at long range as long as you’re in stealth mode (which as in all games is represented by your team crouching down and skulking about rather more slowly than they would otherwise). They also can’t see dead bodies at long range. Unfortunately they can see bodies that are still in the process of becoming dead; melee attacking a guard causes the attacker to exit stealth for the duration of the attack, and nobody has a melee attack that’s quicker than the time it’ll take for a guard to look back in your direction and notice what you’re doing. Ranged attacks have a similar problem; in fact all lethal skills in Shadow Tactics have an associated dying time during which you can’t let any other guards catch sight of the one that’s currently in the process of expiring.

Even if you successfully pull off a kill you then usually have to get rid of the body before a roving patrol moves into close range and spots it, and this is another of the ways that Shadow Tactics differentiates its characters as they all have different ways of moving bodies. Aiko and Yuki have difficulty moving fully-armoured guards around and are limited to dragging the corpse along the ground; this is slow, but secretly quite useful because corpse-dragging is not something other guards will notice at long range. It’s certainly more useful than Hayato’s more normal method of throwing the corpse over his shoulder and walking off with it, which causes him to exit stealth and invariably get spotted. Takumi, being an old man, cannot carry corpses at all, but Mugen makes up for him: as he is the brawniest team member he can carry a corpse under each arm and jog off with them. Corpse disposal points are littered strategically throughout levels, ranging from bushes and wells to simply throwing them off a cliff. Each has an unlimited capacity, which did lead to my wondering at times how such a small shrubbery was able to accommodate seven guards and all their equipment, but if you set real-world logic aside it works well as a gameplay mechanic.

Hiding in shrubberies is also a key element of stealth in general as they completely block guard vision – in fact a significant portion of Shadow Tactics is figuring out how level attributes change the guard vision cones. For example, they can’t see into bushes, but even if they’re just looking past them the bush still blocks their vision enough to turn what would be a close-range patch of their vision cone into a long range, hideable portion.  Being one storey up from a patrolling guard usually does the same thing; two storeys blocks their vision entirely. Rain reduces their vision range, but also creates waterlogged ground that will generate noise as your team tries to slosh through it. And during night missions the guard vision cones are almost entirely made up of long range areas that you can stealth through easily – except around light sources such as torches and braziers, where they’ll spot you no matter how far away they are.

The guards themselves are arranged in such a way that each level is essentially a sequence of puzzle boxes, with each group of guards forming their own little interlocking vision cone ecosystem. You’ll watch guard patterns and patrol routes for 3, 4, 5 (or more) minutes, trying to figure out the weak link; some combination of patrol routes, terrain and character abilities that’ll provide an opportunity to kill just one guard, and by doing so create a blind spot that brings that particular little ecosystem crashing down as you murder your way through the rest of the guards in short order. Most of the time this is incredibly engrossing, and you don’t notice how long you’ve spent playing Shadow Tactics until you finish the mission and see the statistics screen telling you that it somehow took nearly an hour from start to finish.

If I had one criticism of Shadow Tactics’ gameplay, though, it would be that creating those blind spots is sometimes unnecessarily fiddly in terms of controls. Later levels require you to do synchronised guard kills combined with distractions to divert the attention of others, and pulling these complicated combos off is more than a little awkward. The game does have something called Shadow Mode where you can queue up a single action for each character that’ll be executed simultaneously when you hit Enter, but this isn’t enough when what you’re trying to do often relies on three or four actions being executed in sequence; you end up doing them manually and fucking up the execution several times before you get it right. Shadow Tactics is a game of trial and error at heart — it’s even got a timer that reminds you if it’s been more than a minute since your last quicksave — but I felt like in some cases I’d have to reload the save half a dozen more times even after I’d figured out what to do, because the game was fighting me as I tried to carry out my plan. It’s definitely not helped by Shadow Tactics’ interpretation of where exactly you are pointing your mouse cursor sometimes being somewhat… liberal, shall we way, especially around walls, cliffs and other sheer surfaces. The final levels demand a level of precision that the controls simply cannot provide, and it was here that Shadow Tactics briefly crossed the line separating pleasing brain-teaser from annoying time-waster. It managed to drag itself back shortly afterwards; however while it’s a very finely-tuned experience most of the time Shadow Tactics’ level design is some way from being perfect.

This was a little odd, because in almost every other respect the production values are very, very good. Surprisingly so, considering this is an indie title release with almost no fanfare. Each of the levels looks very nice — although Shadow Tactics is lacking the set-piece levels that defined the first two Commandos games, the tradeoff is that its levels are all fully 3D with a rotatable camera that’ll provide the familiar isometric perspective from any point in a 360 degree circle. You team of assassins and spies is finely animated, and I particularly liked little touches like the seamless segue from stabbing to corpse carrying; Hayato won’t let the body slump to the ground but will instead toss it straight over his shoulder. The team also has a ton of high-quality voice acting that isn’t restricted to the Commandos “Oi wish oi could do dat!” soundbites upon being told to do something; they’re constantly talking to each other and building up a rapport with one another. Speaking of, one of the most pleasantly surprising things about Shadow Tactics was this slow building of character without the reliance on the overdone trope of one of the team being an asshole to generate conflict. Your team of five genuinely respects and, later, likes one another; the most obviously mercenary character on the team is the shinobi Hayato, and even he is clearly sticking around for more than money. The character writing isn’t particularly profound in terms of quality, but it is believable and well-judged throughout and does most of the legwork in terms of keeping you invested in what’s going on, because the actual plot is — predictably — utter balls.

Still, this is probably the least important failure for a game that gets nearly everything else so, so right. It doesn’t do anything particularly groundbreaking with the Commandos formula, but it introduces dozens of quality-of-life improvements that are required for that formula to find a receptive new audience in 2016 2017, and it’s a testament to how well it does so that this resurrection of a genre that’s been dead for more than ten years doesn’t feel dated in the least. Shadow Tactics deserves far more attention than it’s currently getting, and it would certainly be a shame if, after doing such a good job of bringing it back to life, the genre simply died a second death because PC gaming sites ignored it in spite of Commandos being one of the most PC-est games ever². I can only hope that it does well enough in spite of this for developers Mimimi to try their hand at a sequel because they’ve clearly got the talent to make Commandos work in the modern age. Shadow Tactics is proof enough of that.

The post Thoughts: Shadow Tactics – Blades Of The Shogun appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.