Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun Review (Victor)
FUNLESS Overall : 3/5
The game looks very attractive at first look since the graphic design is of very good quality, the camera control is smooth and attention has been brought to the many details of every map + the concept is nice
HOWEVER, the gameplay is horrible.
- Maybe because of the camera control, some hitbox are way too small or too large. You'll certainly click on a hook ring when trying to walk on a roof and fail to throw a body from a roof or a cliff because you didn't click on the only pixel letting you a chance to do so. It's especially frustating when you spend 1hour to plan your attack and fail because of a missclik.
- The story (no spoil) is OK until Chapter 9 but then looks like an add-on
- The game provides an option to do 1 action with every character simultaneously... but only one ! If you want a sequence of action, you have to be fast to order them all and it's almost impossible for complex operations (considering the high probability of missclik or the game that doesn't provide you the action you want since your mouse isn't one the single pixel allowing the action). It has to be said also that the characters are extremely slow to pick up a body (especially Hayato, the 2nd stronger one) which will make you fail most of your complex actions
- The designer didn't think about timing cycle of guards (it seems they haven't play the game themselves). You may think it make the game more realistic but in fact, it means that you will need to wait many cycles of the same patrol to time action with another cycle. But sometimes you'll need to time 3, 4 or 5 cycles (that may be 7min long each) and you must whether wait half an hour to get the right timing, whether kill the guard that is problematic (you can distract them but it's not enough). By the way, most problematic "guards" are civilians, that will track your step in the snow and stuff... So you must kill some of them almost every time. From memory, only 2 maps can be done without killing anyone.
- And finally the worst : each scenario has a written way to accomplish every mission so you're not free to solve the issue the way you want. And the written scenario often involve to kill many guards (if not all of them, I made 2 maps by killing around 45/50 people) which is absolutely not realistic and push you to exploit the same trick to kill many guard, so to repeat the same action many time. This isn't what I could expect from an infiltration game.
I finished the game and tried other ways to solve first maps, to take some fun from it. But I was forced to go back on the written way and redo what I've done before.
I don't recommend the game, but with a 80% discount, it may be worth buying it.