Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun is a new hardcore tactical stealth game, developed by ‘Mimimi Productions’ and coming out August 1st for Xbox One, PS4, PC also Linux, Apple, Steam.

Shadow Tactics is set around the Edo period in Japan. That’s interesting and specific. We aren’t 100% certain of the games story but we do know quite a bit concerning the game. The player controls a team of ‘deadly specialists’. Assassins. This game is all about stealth and deciding what to do, how to do it and when to do it.

Firstly the group that you control is filled with very different individuals indeed but they must work together which initially looks impossible. The good thing though is that the game shows interest in the characters. More will be revealed about them including their own personal demons. So yes friendship and trust is important. There is Hayato who is an agile ninja who makes his way through his enemies silently wielding shuriken and sword. Aiko is all about camouflage and a master at it; she also can distract enemies disguised as a geisha. Yuki is all about traps and decoys. Already we can see the strategies already. Takuma is the markmans armed with a sniper rifle. Mugen is a samurai who rather takes the enemy on and is powerful enough to do so.

In Shadow of tactics, players must think carefully about how to approach the missions which are said to be challenging. So players must take into account how the characters will work together as a team. You will face snowy mountain monasteries, castles and even hidden forest camps. So how will you deal with the enemy? Complete stealth as in no one even knew you was there. Lure enemies into traps with decoys or how about a little bit of poison. 

There will be three difficulty levels so this game does have some mercy. There are multiple ways to take out your enemies so be creative and get experimental. You can move from roof to roof and even climb buildings for that elevation advantage over your enemies. Yes, we are all thinking it. Takuma should always be placed up on buildings for that nice clean shot.

We checked out some gameplay and we are definitely happy about this. The stealth mechanics here are more realistic as in you can’t kill someone standing right next to another enemy and no one notice. The environment can be used to your advantage like having Yuki cause a boulder to fall and cruch enemies below. In shadow mode you can set one action for each character. Then hit execute to have everything happen at once. If the enemy spot a dead body, they will actually do something realistic like alert all other guards and even call for reinforcements. You can hide in bushes and see a line of sight, just like in ‘Assassins creed Chronicles China’, meaning you can see where the enemies can see and what they are looking at. This game has got nothing but positive feedback and really high ratings across the board.

Overall this looks like an outstanding game. We would honestly prefer the game to be a bit more zoomed, like have everything bigger but it’s still great. The graphics are excellent and the environments have proof of work put into them. The sounds are what you would expect from a game set in this time and location and works very well. The developers ‘Mimimi Productions’ did an excellent job with this game. We at X35 Earthwalker are looking forward to more media and information concerning Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun. Samurais are very popular but… not as popular as the ‘Earth Walk!’