Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun: Aiko's Choice

The battle against the enigmatic warlord Kage-sama continues, but Mugen's elite band of operatives face a new threat when their hideout is raided and the band scattered. They seek to reunite and defeat their new enemy before resuming the fight.

Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun was one of the very best games of 2016, a skillful resurrection of the long-defunct stealth tactics genre (best exemplified by the Commandos and Desperados series). A brilliant game, the same developers were hired to make the official Desperados III, an even stronger title. The developers have, slightly randomly, decided to make a stand-alone expansion for Shadow Tactics whilst working on a brand new game (though still in the same genre).

Aiko's Choice takes place just before the conclusion of Shadow Tactics and sees our familiar band of adventurers and their diverse skillsets broken up. The first mission is really about using Mugen, Aiko and Hayato to rescue Yuki, a rather amusing nod to the fact that many Shadow Tactics find the trap-laying, enemy-luring Yuki the most powerful (if not over-powered) character in the game. Relying on Aiko and Hayato, fragile stealth-ninjas, and Mugen, a huge tank of a warrior who isn't as useful in raw stealth situations, immediately presents a fiendish challenge. This becomes even more challenging when it turns out that the developers have learned a lot from making the original game and Desperados III and applied every one of those lessons to this game's formidable level design.

The map design of the two preceding games is among the best in the genre, if not gaming as a whole, and the maps here are a step up even from there. At first glimpse, some of the maps look completely impossible, with enemies standing in plain sight of one another in a way that taking them out without alerting every enemy on the map seems flat-out impossible. Eventually you will work out a way, locating a single enemy on patrol who goes out of sight of their fellows for a few seconds or finding a fiendish spot where you can lure enemies to their doom, and then the rest of the map will start unravelling beautifully.

There's only five missions here, two of which are brief interludes with only a few isolated options for how to get around. The other three maps are gigantic, with tons of options, side-objectives and opportunities for chaos. If you love the franchise and the genre, the sheer volume of enemies to dispatch, environmental objects to manipulate, traps to lay and sneakery to enjoy will feel like Christmas. Less agile players should feel free to turn down the difficulty to "Easy," as "Medium" in this game is brutally tough and the actual "Hard" mode is for masochists or the supremely talented only.

So the strength of the game remains in the formidable map design and the sheer delight you experience when you conquer an apparently insurmountable challenge. The characterisation of the team and the voice acting also remains strong. However, the game has a few limitations. The first is that this is literally just more Shadow Tactics, albeit with somewhat stronger map design. There's no new characters, enemy types or abilities. It uses the exact same engine and the exact same controls. The latter is particularly challenging if you got used to Desperados III's more aggressive playstyle and pause-planning mode. There is no way to pause and survey the battlefield in Aiko's Choice, and it can take quite a while to get used again to the more limited "shadow mode" in Shadow Tactics as compared to Desperados' more generous, forgiving planning options. As noted, this is a tougher, less forgiving game than its forebears, and some of the awkwardness of the original game, particularly when it comes to timing moves or maneuvering characters correctly, remains intact. It's rarely a huge problem, but the isolated event of the game getting confused as to whether you're moving a character along a wall or trying to get them to jump off onto a nearby rooftop continues to crop up.

Aiko's Choice (****½) is a fine expansion and add-one for one of the very best games of the last five years. It is very much an expansion, despite its stand-alone nature, and I'd recommend not even thinking about tackling it until you've completed the original game in full. Some of the controls and UI have not aged well, but for an impressive challenge and one of the best stealth franchises in existence, this remains an excellent game. Aiko's Choice is available now on PC and is in development for Xbox One and PlayStation 4.