What I love most is when a genre is revived by people who really truly understand it. The developers of Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun clearly understood why the classic tactics stealth games like Commandos worked. It has always been a very niche small genre, seemingly influenced by both real time tactics classics like Myth series and by the stealth titles like Metal Gear, and it hasn’t seen any truly worthy successors for years. Even later Commandos games and the similar Desperados games usually never got the same love and praise the original titles did and some (citation needed) might even claim those games to “not get it” as well. But Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun? Now this game gets it. And I suck at it pretty badly, as expected.
In case you are not familiar with this specific subgenre of real time tactics games, the general concept of games like this is about having a small team of people, all with unique skills, who have to accomplish a specific goal on a map full of enemy (and sometimes neutral) NPC characters, preferably in a stealthy way, since otherwise they die very easily. Games are almost always with a top down view, lots of hotkeys and controls common to strategy games and top down RPGs. In Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun in particular, the camera can also be rotated, but some older titles had pre-set view angle. Enemies have view cones your characters should avoid, awareness levels, they can hear certain sounds made and generally behave as usual for a classic stealth game, most closely resembling the first few MGS titles. Your resources are usually limited, with most effective and powerful skills and tools being limited (sometimes with an ability to get more stuff on the map) and usually the whole concept of any map is about figuring out how to approach each segment in the most efficient stealthy way, while trying not to make things worse for yourself for later segments.
And, as mentioned, Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun really gets it. Every character is unique enough to be highly useful for certain tasks, while never feeling underutilized for a particular mission they are available for. Some character skills overlap, but never to a point where you can easily substitute a character for another. Maps utilize various special conditions and tricks to keep gameplay varied. And the game introduces a really cool mode, where you can give your characters commands in an “active pause” type of manner and then execute all queued commands at once. The developers also tried to remove all the usual pitfalls of the genre, so you can easily quicksave and quickload (there’s even a reminder with a timer since last time you’ve saved), highlight or hide enemy and interactive object outlines and combine several separate actions into one.
That said, some things remain frustrating. Yet again, for a top down camera game where you can rotate the camera, I had lots of issues with it because you need to rotate the camera, not just “can” do it. If you use quick rotation buttons, you would sometimes be still unable to select the moving spot you wish, because of a very narrow spot your character is in. It’s sometimes really hard to tell if you’re on a different elevation level in comparison to something you want to go to, with characters refusing to move if it is. Sometimes hiding bodies doesn’t seem to work outright if you queue the action to the edge of the hiding spot or perform several actions at once. And the game is actually performing rather averagely for a title that doesn’t look that fantastic, and still has some bugs. Though at the moment of me writing this a new patch has just been released, which improves the speed and performance of the game and seemingly fixes some of the bugs I’ve encountered.
I sucked at Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun more often than I didn’t. But I loved it. It’s a well made love letter to a genre that needs to be revived, that accepts the fact that you need to abuse the hell out of saves on your first playthroughs a lot to not get mad at the game. And just makes it as fun to do as possible. I hope these developers make more games, learning from the experience of this title. And I hope more developers show their love for the real time stealth tactics, because it’s one of those genres/subgenres that needs more love.