Shadow Tactics is an enjoyable game, though one that wore out it’s welcome a little bit in the end.
At it’s core its a commandos style isometric tactical stealth game. That’s a genre I have occasionally dabbled in, playing Commando’s with a friend over a decade ago, but otherwise being aware but not really doing more than dipping my toes into the genre.
Shadow Tactics is another of those games that ended up being purchased on the cheap for £3.50 around 3 and a half years ago, and in an effort to actually cut down my backlog, I have been diving into those games I have piled up. I went into Shadow Tactics knowing very little, other than it had very good reviews on steam, was sent in Japan Edo period, was a stealth game, and it looked interesting.
The game rewarded me pretty well. Presentation wise it’s excellent. It might not be AAAA graphics in blistering RTX on vision, but each map is gorgeous. Though the game is fully in isometric view, there’s so many different details on each level, and a general sense of scale. I even found the cutscenes, while in isometric view again, well animated so to give people in it a greater sense of character. The art style is beautiful, and in some ways the game reminded me in look of a table top model piece.
Sound design seems decent. The voice acting was pretty good, I only heard a little of the English VO as I chose to have the Japanese voices on instead, but both seemed good, and again characters seemed distinctive and well acted.
The game ran well. As a sidenote I did until the half way point have a huge issue with crashing, which I thought was likely because it was a Unity engine game. Turns out that Unity doesn’t seem to like recent intel CPUs, which have problems with many newer games and engines, eg Unreal Engine 5. Using intel XTU to turn down the core performance ration by 3 fixed all crashes, and I can’t hold Intel’s shoddy CPUs against this game.
Storywise it’s not groundbreaking, but it really held my attention. It’s typical historical Japanese fare, feuding factions, plots and assassins. The main villain of the affair is hidden but very obvious, though I did have it spoiled a bit before this reveal by a walk-through I glanced at, but I wasn’t exactly shocked. A major twist 2/3rds of the way into the game wasn’t spoiled for me, and actually I thought worked really well as an emotional gut punch. The decision that a character makes also feels completely in keeping with the time period and code of morality that would govern historical Japan. The writing for each character is pretty decent, being likeable but again not keeping them too modern, and each was distinctive, so while the main plot of the game is humdrum, the fate of the characters really interested me, as did the general historical atmosphere of the game. I’m a sucker for any historical game that keeps the fantasy elements out and has good atmosphere, and this game delivers.
On the gameplay front, I mostly found it very good. It’s as mentioned, typical commandos fare, control up to 5 different characters with different skills and abilities to complete missions such as stealing items or assisting important officials, while trying to avoid detection. The game has handy tools like vision cones and a shadow mode where you can plan actions and then execute them at the push of a button. The game encourages save scumming with a handy popup when you’ve not saved for more than a minute. While at first I found the odd bit of frustration in getting caught, I quickly found the ability to reload and try again got me through this, and I began to approach each situation like a puzzle, and really found the whole thing enjoyable. I only occasionally glanced at a walkthrough and enjoyed figuring each situation out, using the characters in different combinations.
Minor negatives, I found controlling the characters in some actions when I needed to be quick to avoid detection, eg moving bodies and getting rid of them, a little clunky. I also felt that the game slightly overstayed it’s welcome. By the final mission I felt that the game was starting to get repetitive. The last mission is nothing new, no spoilers but it’s another castle full of guards with a man to assassinate at the top, with nothing to mix it up. By that point all the characters had been introduced and there were no new abilities, so it felt like treading old ground. I confess I used a walkthrough to cheese through the last level.
I have bought the expansion, Aiko’s choice, but will probably give it a break for a bit before moving on to that so it feels a little fresher. Still at 25 hours Shadow Tactics not a short game, and I didn’t think it got too thin until the very end. I think a part of that is that I’m pretty new to the genre and not a stealthy gamer by nature per say. There is plenty here to encourage repeat playthroughs, with badges to encourage different approaches, like no killing or using certain methods to complete missions.
Overall a very enjoyable little game that has opened up a genre to me that I haven’t really got into before.
