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I was on the fence on whether to recommend this game or not. I ultimately chose to recommend it based on the summer sale price — it is a worthwhile game for less than $10. I definitely would not recommend it at the full price of $40. It is a solid game with good production values, but has major flaws in terms of replayability and fun.
Shadow Tactics is a stealth game set in Edo Japan. You simultaneously control up to five characters trying to sneak their way through 13 missions taking place in highly-detailed historical set pieces. Your characters are outnumbered and outgunned, so they have to use a variety of tricks to slowly weave their way through a gauntlet of trigger-happy guards.
This game is hard. It is unfair, rage-inducing, and will have you swearing out loud. Your characters have brought swords to a gun fight, with predictable results. If a guard spots you they will instantly get a shot off, shaving off 25% of your health and momentarily stunning you, and they reload almost as quickly as you recover. If you happen to be in firing range of two or more guards when one spots you, the mission is effectively over. This wouldn't be so bad, except most enemies like to stand around in triangles staring at each other, so taking down one means alerting two others. All too often you will kill what appears to be an isolated sentry, only to discover he is being watched by another hidden behind a piece of terrain.
Furthermore, this game punishes you for playing bad — each time you are spotted, the level becomes harder. A single guard seeing you or a dead body will instantly alert every enemy within a two screen radius, along with half a dozen new guards who spawn from nearby buildings. Aggravatingly, the newly spawned guards do not go away after they get bored of searching for you — they start patrolling and become a permanent addition to the map. Earlier maps can even spawn samurai, who you don't have the means to defeat yet, so you now have to deal with invincible enemies wandering around.
The creators seem to have realized how unfair the game is, so they put in emulator-style F5 and F8 quicksave keys to let you brute-force your way through levels. Unfortunately, they also put a quicksave button on the edge of the screen, right where you will be frantically clicking to run away after being spotted. God help you if you accidentally click it 100 minutes into a two hour mission.
In terms of playable characters, you get three ninjas, a samurai and a sniper. The ninja-type characters play mostly the same, have the greatest mobility — jumping up to rooftops and swimming underwater — and make up the bulk of the game. The samurai is a beast, able to mow down a group of enemies with a single attack, is the only character with enough health to tank a few hits, can effortlessly carry two bodies, and is the only character who can solo the fearsome samurai enemies — so of course, he is also a magnet for bad plot-related things happening to him and is the character you get to use the least. The sniper is just terrible — the elderly cripple isn't able to carry bodies, makes a ton of noise while moving around, and is able to take down fewer than half a dozen guards before running out of ammo and becoming useless for the rest of the mission. You rarely get to use all five characters in a mission; more often, it's two or three.
Disappointingly, nothing you do has any impact on the story. Each of the characters has a non-lethal attack, but there is no reason (except optional achievements) to use them — it's actually a bad idea because knocked out guards will immediately raise an alert when they wake up. There are unarmed civilians on every map, but the game gives you no reason to not indiscriminately slaughter them — if you don't, they'll just snitch on you to the guards. In a mission where your characters have been framed for a crime and have to sneak through a military camp of their former allies, they will complain the first few times you kill somebody, but even if you systematically murder everyone on the map, they are absolved of any wrongdoing with exactly the same dialog as completing the mission with zero casualties. In another, you are supposed to steal documents from a high-ranking official without killing him, but even if you knock him out and toss him into your getaway wagon, the story happily ignores your off-script actions.
Gameplay is a bit janky. Sometimes you'll try to sneak up behind a guard to kill them, only for your character to ignore the kill command and wander in front of the enemy, dancing uselessly in place while they get shot in the face. Other times you'll try to quickly pick up a body before a patrol catches you, only for the game to decide that what you're really trying to do is jump down into the courtyard full of enemies. Skipping cutscenes can glitch characters into standing around where they're not supposed to be, breaking their AI and soft-locking the game if you attack them. I have witnessed dialog getting stuck in a loop for the entire mission. Controlling more than one character at a time is rarely a good idea, so you'll often find yourself clearing the map with one character while the rest lounge around at the start.
If there is one thing that redeems this game, it is the (English dialog version) characterization of the feral teen ninja Yuki. She will steal your heart with her innocent quirks of anthropomorphizing inanimate objects and cheerfully committing first-degree murder, all while sounding distinctly British among dozens of fake Japanese accents. When you have pressed F8 for the twentieth time in two minutes, if nothing else, keep going for her sake.