Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun

Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun is secretly last year’s best stealth game.

An excellent stealth game with beautiful visuals and incredibly deep, complex and varied gameplay.

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PS2 Stealth classic Commandos 2: Men Of Courage was a unique title that's never really been matched on consoles since. The game had you take control of an elite squad of soldiers in World War II as they tackled clandestine missions behind enemy lines. It was a deeply satisfying and stripped down experience, far removed from the base building and resource management strategy fans might have been us...

An excellent and challenging update to a familiar formula, Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun is one of those games that makes you cheer at your well-planned success when everything goes off without a hitch, and groan at your own poor planning when it doesn’t. It gets so much right, that the relentless difficulty, and slightly less gorgeous console port can’t mar its beauty. This one snuck up ...

18 years – this much time has passed since the release of the first Commandos. Today, in Shadow Tactics, its spirit returns along with the magic of isometric tactical stealth games – they were difficult, a bit rough around the edges, but also fun to play.

It's hardly a secret that I'm a fan of strategy games. This extends to each and every sub-genre: real-time strategy, grand strategy, 4X and the tactical varieties. What was always strange to me is that real-time tactics (RTT) has been treated as the unwanted step-child of the genre. It's particularly strange since, compared to the rest of the genre, it was almost consistently successful. Titles su...

Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun’s uncommon attentiveness to characters and story elevate what is already a really entertaining and mentally stimulating quest across 17th-Century Japan. The near-constant annoyance of the camera definitely hindered my feeling of being a zen ninja assassin. Overall though, developer Mimimi has put together one of the most punishing and clever top-down stealth ga...

Tantō in the back.

Without a doubt, the worst aspect of Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun is its camera. It doesn’t automatically move to keep your current character at its centre, requiring you to constantly move the right analogue stick to keep them in view. And to rotate the view to see around corners etc. you need to hold down the right trigger while moving the right analogue stick. There’s nothing wrong with...

I’ve spent a few work nights staying up way too late playing, just to see what it would throw at me next. With the replayability built into each mission, I can imagine a few more of those nights on the horizon.

There aren’t many games like Shadow Tactics, and thankfully, it sets the bar high for any would-be challengers. The blend of RTS controls with stealth-oriented gameplay and level design create incredibly satisfying, almost puzzle-like encounters. It takes a lot of time and patience to be able to discover the solutions to these puzzles, however, and the hours long missions often left me feeling fat...