Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew

The Lost Caribbean, a world between the living and the dead, ruled over by the menacing Inquisition of the Burning Maiden. Several lost souls find themselves drawn to the Red Marley, a forbidding ship, and a quest to find the treasure of the legendary Captain Mordechai. But the quest will be long and arduous, requiring the recruiting of a crew with...unique talents.

Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew is the third stealth tactics game from Mimimi Games, the accomplished team behind Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun (and its standalone expansion, Aiko's Choice) and Desperados III. On a basic level, this is a very similar game to those ones, and if you've played those already (and you should, they are excellent), you can jump into this one without too many problems.

To recap, these games are played from an isometric perspective with you controlling a group of characters with different abilities. Your objective is usually to pass through an area patrolled by guards using a mixture of stealth and violence. You can sneak up behind people and knock them out or kill them, but you have to be careful to stay out of the view of other guards (guards have "view cones" so you can see if you're in view, out of view but if you cause a big enough commotion you'll become visible, or out of view altogether). You can hide bodies in water or undergrowth. You can also queue up actions for characters which they can execute simultaneously, to take down multiple opponents, or cause a distraction to allow your other characters to sneak past.

Each character has different abilities, and in Shadow Gambit the supernatural setting means these abilities are whackier and more creative than in the other games. One character can dip in and out of another dimension, snatching enemies away into another universe, or hiding in plain sight. Another character can put enemies and allies into a massive cannon on her back and shoot them to otherwise inaccessible locations. Another character has a flute he can use to lure opponents off their patrol routes to isolated areas where they can be dealt with quietly. A ghostly character can possess enemy guards and wander around in plain view before triggering mayhem. And so on.

The biggest shift in this game is that it adopts a more of flexible approach. Both Shadow Tactics and Desperados III had a linear succession of missions, with you moving from mission to mission. Shadow Gambit instead has a world map showing the Lost Caribbean, with several islands available to visit (and later in the game, all the islands). You have multiple missions available at any time and can choose between the next main story mission, a character-based side-mission, or a challenge or treasure-hunting mission. Each of the eight characters (nine including the DLC, ten including the character you unlock right at the end of the game) has their own multi-part, optional mission which explores more of their backstory and motivation.

In addition, between each mission your crew regroups on your ship, the spooky Red Marley. There are activities that can be undertaken between each mission, including various character-based quests on the ship. The result is that there's a lot to do in the game, with a greater variety of activities.

This doesn't come at the expense of focus though. Shadow Gambit more or less matches Desperado III in game length (about 35 hours) if you focus on doing the main storyline and character side-missions, but with the optional stuff it significantly exceeds it, giving you a solid amount of value for money.

As with the prior games, the games have solid, characterful graphics, great music and nicely reactive controls. The story is quite entertaining, and the way it interfaces with the game mechanics (never before has "Quicksave" been referenced so much as an actual in-game concept) is very clever. There are some issues, particularly with the game still sometimes getting confused over whether you are trying to move to or target an area on the same level or above or below you (occasionally resulting in your character jumping into the midst of a group of enemies for no discernible reason), something I'd hoped they would have fixed after eight years. But in most cases this can be avoided by rotating the camera to a more favourable angle.

A more interesting limitation is that the game doesn't feel quite as tightly-designed as the previous incarnations. Because the previous games were more linear, they knew exactly what characters would be available for which mission, and could design fiendish puzzles for the specific make-up of the crew you knew would be going on that quest. Here, because any combination of characters (up to 3 out of the eventual pool of 10) can go on any quest, the missions by necessity have to be more flexible, to allow for a wide variety of approaches. This makes most missions feel a bit easier than in the prior games. Conversely that makes Shadow Gambit more forgiving for newcomers, who may find this game more accessible than Desperados III or Shadow Tactics.

More unfortunate is the news that, after completing this game, Mimimi decided to call it a day on game development and shut down the company (although they did deliver several updates and two new DLC episodes for the game beforehand). They will very much be missed; Shadow Gambit completes a very fine triptych of enjoyable, intelligent and satisfying stealth 'em ups.

Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew (****½) lacks the tight and fiendish mission design of their previous two games, but is still a compelling combination of stealth and semi-justified light murder and body-hiding. The game is available now on PC, Xbox X/S and PlayStation 5.

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SHADOW TACTICS developers call time on their company

In sad news, German developers Mimimi Games will be shutting down following the release of their most recent game, Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew. The Munich-based team are best-known for their thematic trilogy of stealth games inspired by classic 1990s titles Commandos and Desperados.

The company started off in 2011 with mobile title daWindci, before developing the colourful platformer The Last Tinker: City of Colors (2014). They switched gears to their first stealth tactics game, Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun (2016), an extraordinarily accomplished and impressive title. The team got to work with one of their inspirational IPs when they then made Desperados III (2020). They returned to the success of their first title with a stand-alone expansion, Aiko's Choice (2021), before developing their last game. Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew (2023) is a much less linear and more open title than their previous games, whilst preserving their stealth focus. Despite extremely strong reviews, Shadow Gambit's initial sales were disappointing, likely a result of the game launching almost exactly between two of the biggest titles of the year (Baldur's Gate 3 and Starfield).

According to the managers, developing these three games one after the other proved extremely taxing and expensive, and faced with the prospect of doing it all again, they decided instead to call time on the company. It will wind up over the next few months whilst releasing patch and balance updates for Shadow Gambit.

This is sad news, as Mimimi's style of stealth tactics gameplay was extremely addictive, resulting in three polished, challenging games which rewarded ingenious and original play. Hopefully another team will pick up the baton of continuing this style of title.

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.

Desperados III

The Old West, 1870. Bounty hunter John Cooper is hunting down Frank, a notorious outlaw who killed his father. Frank is in bed with the DeVitt Railroad Corporation, and thus is protected by wealth and power. Cooper joins forces with a group of disparate allies who each have their own reasons for taking on these formidable enemies. They have to work together and make the most use of their skills to win the day.

Back in 2016, Mimimi Games came out nowhere to deliver Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun. A stealth tactics game built around achieving at times impossible-seeming objectives with a limited team of characters. It was unexpectedly genius and emerged as my favourite game of the year. It was a game that wore its influences pretty openly: the Commandos series from the late 1990s but, possibly even more overtly, the Desperados series from the early 2000s. Focus Interactive, who had the Desperados IP, hit on the idea of hiring Mimimi to make a prequel to those games (to not put off newcomers to the series) using the Shogun engine. It was a match made in heaven.

Fortunately, this partnership delivers in spades. Desperados III wears two hats, as an actual continuation of the Desperados series and also as a semi-sequel to Blades of the Shogun. It fulfils both objectives admirably.

The game consists of sixteen missions, each taking place on a massive (and I do mean massive) map filled with enemies. You have between 1 and 5 characters, each with their own distinctive personality and set of skills, equipment and objectives. The aim of the game is stealth: you have to reach an objective by avoiding guards. You can try to sneak past them or pick them off one-by-one. Whilst your characters are capable fighters, they are very easily overwhelmed, so the aim of the game is to keep as low a profile as possible. You can also knock guards (or well-meaning civilians who'll raise the alarm if they spot you somewhere you shouldn't be) out if the idea of mass slaughter is unpalatable, but doing so is time-consuming and you risk detection.

There is some cleverness to the game. One of your characters can whistle to lure unsuspecting guards into ambushes, or one of your female gunfighters can put on a disguise and lure enemies to their doom, but more disciplined enemies will ignore such distractions, forcing you to be more creative in how you handle the situation. An optional mode allows you to pause the game to set up actions for your characters to execute simultaneously, a good way of taking out two guards who are permanently in each other's field of view.

Desperados III adds guns to the Blades of the Shogun mix and encourages a somewhat more aggressive style of play throughout. Each gun as a noise area which will alert guards in that zone, so you can be surprisingly aggressive in taking on enemies as long as you are also careful of what the consequences might be. Your sniper character - Dr. McCoy - is decidedly powerful in taking out enemies on watchtowers (whose disappearances tend to be easily missed by their comrades), but he is limited by ammo.

The decidedly semi-realistic tone of the game takes a turn for the weird just before the halfway mark when you recruit a character who can use actual voodoo magic, including seizing control of an enemy's mind or "linking" two characters together so whatever happens to one, happens to both. This feels a bit weird (and even overpowered) when it first appears, but it later gives rise to some of the game's most inventive puzzles and challenges, so it's fair enough. Some of the moves you can pull off with Isabella (and her pet cat) will have the player giggling like a buffoon.

Desperados III succeeds through its magnificent level design, which is often jaw-dropping. It's not uncommon, especially in the back half of the game, to be confronted by a mission that appears flat-out impossible, until you find that one guard who goes out of everyone else's eyeline for a few seconds, which then causes the map to start unravelling lot a knot. Each mission is systemic rather than prescriptive, though; it's completely up to you which tactics and abilities you use to achieve each objective. There's some excellent videos of the game developers being taken by surprise by some of the solutions that players have come up with to puzzles. There's also a splendid mission post-mortem screen which takes you (fairly quickly) step-by-step through the mission you just completed, showing how it unfolded without the several dozen quicksaves and quickloads you likely went through in the process.

The story is a fairly serviceable revenge narrative, but there's some nice character beats dropped on top of that (such as grumpy McCoy's gradual, reluctant acceptance into the team). At sixteen missions taking about 35 hours to complete, the game also hits a sweet spot of not being too long whilst not outstaying its welcome. In a welcome move, the game adds a bunch of optional missions at the end of the game which take place on the existing maps, but adds new enemies and puzzles, or allows you to use characters who weren't available earlier on in the game. More of these missions will be dynamically added in free updates over the coming months.

I'm not sure if there's any flaws of note in the game. It does share Shogun's occasional confusion on what you're trying to get a character to do, such as thinking you're trying to get a character to climb a wall rather than hide in the shadows next to it, but these occasions were much reduced from the first games. Hardcore Desperados fans may also grumble about the lack of utility for horses. In the original games you can ride horses (sometimes using them to reach inaccessible ledges), release them from the stables to cause a distraction or come up with other creative ideas; in this came the only thing you can do with them is spook them to kicking someone standing next to them.

Overall, Desperados III (*****) is compelling, incredibly smart, fiendishly clever and ridiculously addictive as it forces you to overcome its challenges on each mission. It is available now on PC, PlayStation 4 and X-Box One.

Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun

The Shogun of Japan has unified his country after years of war, but a new warlord named Kage-sama has arisen and is gathering allies. The Shogun tasks an elite samurai warrior, Mugen, with identifying Kage-sama and defeating him. More comfortable fighting on the battlefield than from the shadows, Mugen assembles a crack team of unconventional warriors to aid him: shinobi Hayato, courtesan-assassin Aiko, elderly crack marksman Takuma and young thief Yuki. Together they set out to defend Japan and its Shogun from a shadowy enemy.

Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s there was a flurry of games played from an overhead perspective that emphasised stealth, skill-based gameplay and player freedom on how to complete objectives. These included the three-game Commandos series (particularly the second), the two-game Desperados series and the one-off Robin Hood: Legend of Sherwood. These games were noted for their atmosphere and level of challenge. They gradually faded away as developers chose to switch to first and third-person perspectives for stealth games.

The most recent title to dabble in this genre recently was the excellent cyberpunk game Satellite Reign. Ostensibly a spiritual sequel to the 1993 combat-heavy Syndicate, Satellite Reign took the opportunity to change things up and add classes, skills and stealth systems, making it more like a cyberpunk Commandos but with a more viable choice between combat and stealth. Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun is made by a completely different developer, but both games use the Unity Engine and have some similarities in interface and feel, although obviously the aesthetics are completely different.

Once again you control a group  of agents who are given missions to perform. You can control anything from two to five agents per mission. Unlike other games in this genre, you don't create the operatives or decide on their equipment or skills. Instead you are given five characters, each of whom has a distinct personality, voice acting and backstory. This immediately personalises the game a lot more, with your team discussing how each mission is progressing and occasionally giving hints on how to proceed.

The game is played from an overhead perspective and you have to guide your agents through a location to achieve mission objectives. Sometimes the location is a town or village inhabited by civilians and you have to avoid giving away your position and remaining undetected (if you have to kill people to do that, so be it but the game does give out achievements and badges for nonlethal approaches). Most levels, however, are crawling with enemy soldiers and samurai and you are given freer reign to kill your way to victory. However, this is more easily said than done. Your characters are relatively fragile and enemies are quick to give the alarm if they see you. Each enemy has a "viewing cone" which shows if they they will spot you if you start moving. Sometimes taking an enemy down is as easy as sneaking up behind them, stabbing them and moving their body into the nearest bush. Basic soldiers are also easy to distract, either through Hayato throwing rocks, Takuma's pet Kuma doing tricks or Yuki's flute luring them into a trap, but more disciplined troops (wearing straw hats) are much more vigilant. Toughest of all are samurai, heavily armoured troops invulnerable to most attacks and who can only be killed by Mugen in honourable combat or brought to their knees by gunfire and then killed in melee.

Sometimes groups of enemies have to be taken down simultaneously through "Shadow Mode", allowing you to queue up one action per character and then execute them at once. So if two guards are standing in each other's eyelines, you can arrange for Yuki to stab one in the back and Hayato to throw a shuriken at the other to take out both before they can raise the alarm.

Each character has a diverse skill set which can be used in tandem with other characters to come up with some epic game moments. Using Aiko's sneezing powder to briefly blind a guard whilst Mugen kills two other guards ten feet away with his Sword Wind attack and then run off with both bodies before the first guy can recover is hilarious, especially when the blinded guard recovers and wonders if he's going mad. There are also environmental actions possible, such as knocking rocks onto passing troops or bringing down tree branches to crush enemies in ways that look accidental.

Each level is meticulously, fantastically well-designed. Each obstacle has multiple ways of overcoming it and, because Blades of the Shogun is a game of systems rather than planned set-pieces, some of them were never expected by the developers. This leads to tremendously satisfying emergent gameplay moments, such as when I used a cow as a way of safely eavesdropping on two samurai standing two feet away, or created a "tower of death" with Yuki luring passing guard after passing guard to its summit and their doom (I think I topped out at about 15 bodies hidden in the tower).

The game's graphical style is beautiful, varied and always compelling. Character models are relatively undetailed due to the bird's eye view, but well-animated with characterisation being helped by body language as well as the very good voice acting. The music is minimalistic but accomplished.

The game works brilliantly. Coming up with a plan to take down two or three enemies at the same time without alerting the camp and then executing it is tremendously satisfying, but adapting on the fly to changing circumstances can also be exhilarating. If you're discovered and the alarm goes up, staying and fighting head-on is suicidal but if you've planned for it, laid traps and got the right characters in the right place, you can still wreck mayhem on the arriving troops. On one level Mugen ambushed a strung-out line of reinforcements with devastating efficiency, killing over 60 enemies whilst remaining undetected. The stealth model is also vigorous, fair and even a little bit forgiving. Generally if the alarm goes up, it's because you haven't done enough preparation, positioned a character incorrectly or chose the wrong tactic.

That said, the game's interface could be a bit more streamlined and context-sensitive. You have to select an action - even the basic attack - and then click on the target, which feels more cumbersome than it should be. The camera controls are also not the most reactive, with mission objectives occasionally failing because you couldn't spin the camera fast enough to click on the right spot, which is aggravating. Finally, the game has problems working out if you are trying to get a character to jump on top of a wall or hide behind it, resulting in delays, more camera-spinning and the risk of discovery.  However, it takes only a couple of levels to learn the limitations of the engine and adjust to it accordingly.

Games of this type are traditionally light on narrative and story, but Blades of the Shogun has a compelling story told through the five characters you guide from mission to mission. It's not going to win prizes for originality, but it's fun and there are a couple of unexpected twists.

Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun (*****) is an addictive, challenging and highly enjoyable game. It has a great story and characters, coupled with some impressive freedom on how to complete objectives. I wasn't expecting a game to come out of nowhere and very nearly walk off with the title of best game of the year, but Shadow Tactics makes a very strong case for it. The game is available on PC from Steam and GoG now. You can also download a free demo from Steam and GoG to try the game before you buy. The game will be released on PlayStation 4 and X-Box One in 2017.