izigame.me

It took me 50 hours to fully complete the game, including all badges (side objectives) and achievements. This requires playthroughs on Hardcore and on a time limit for each mission; it will be relevant later. Based on both my Normal and Hardcore playthroughs, I recommend Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun.
The game encourages you to first explore on your own by hiding badges and future missions until you play through each mission. I averaged around 1.5 hours on my first playthrough of each mission on Normal difficulty. That means that there's about 20 hours of gameplay if you don't care about completing all achievements.
I really enjoyed how every aspect of combat flows together. You can one- or two-shot all enemies, but the mission gets harder if another enemy raises the alarm. So you distract them with your characters' skills or use the environment like snow, darkness, and noise. You can plan these distractions by checking for patrols and lines of sight since there's no fog of war, or queue up an action on each character with "Shadow Mode." Watching your characters execute multiple enemies at the same time is always fun.
However, there's no slow motion or pause mechanic, except when time briefly slows down when your character is in an enemy's line of sight. When enemies are searching for you, they also move more randomly and are harder to predict or plan for. Quick save (F5) and quick load (F8) are your friends. Here's the catch: quick load remembers your total time played, which messes with the time limit for badges. You can restart the map and load to bypass this problem, but it's unintuitive and wastes your time.
Every map has a distinct design, multiple solutions, and Easter eggs. I enjoyed my time in this playground of murder and stealth. Once I finished my first blind playthrough of a mission on Normal, I watched speedruns on YouTube and followed them to finish my timed playthrough on Hardcore. I'd recommend watching, in no particular order, 4hinzo, Optibum, and panzerrunner.
The playable characters are distinct in skill set and character design... and I had nothing else nice to say about them until after a major plot twist. The consequences of the twist, not the twist itself, made me care so much more about the characters. The voice actors constantly use -chan and hai and Japanese proper nouns, but some of them are better at pronouncing these words than others.
Nevertheless, the story has a satisfying ending. I thoroughly enjoyed this game from start to finish. I bought the Anniversary bundle for $13.55 on sale, but I recommend the base game on its own merits.
Thanks for reading my review.