The spiritual successor to the Commandos series - Shadow Tactics - releases in two weeks on the 6th december. Since I haven't heard too much hype around the game outside of german pc magazines I wanted to ask here if anyone is excited for it?
In case you don't know what the Commandos series is: The game basically gives you command of a squad of highly competent specialists and tasks you with infiltrating enemy bases and strongholds in various missions. Shadow Tactics itself plays in the transitional period of feudal japan with the war of the shogun. The game gives you command of five different agents: A samurai, a ninja, a geisha, a street girl and a sharpshooter.
If that sounds appealing to you, you should check out the demo they released. Yes, the game has an actual demo released before the game comes out on steam and gog. And you can download and play the first two mission of the game right now. The developers even said that the progress of the demo gets included in the main game when you start it.
If you want to know a bit more about the game I will share my personal impressions of the demo here: It's really good. I just played the first two missions of the demo but they are both really fun and allow for multiple ways for dealing with each situation. One thing I exspecially love about the demo is that it made me do something I had never done before: Score-attack.
I am a completionist in most games but I never really had the patience to replay the same mission over and over again to get additional achievements in any game. I just try and get as much as possible on my first time through and leave it at that.
This game changed that merely by the ability to play in several different ways and the clever incentive the game had. The game offers various badges and achievements for each mission. While the "speedrun" mission is availible in every mission the others seem to be mostly different for different missions. Which made it a lot of fun. When I played the first mission over for the first time I went for a non-lethal approach to the mission. And unlike other games non-lethal/lethal isn't merely a binary option of how much blood you want to see around the unmoving body you will be moving around afterwards. Enemies wake up from being knocked out and they do it pretty fast. Luckily they don't sound the alarm when waking up, which the game comments on by having them mutter about being embarrased for having gotten knocked out. But they do search each availible hiding spot in the vicinity which can get you into very big troubles. So the non-lethal approach to the mission was to knock people out, hide the bodies (Since guards do sound the alarm when they see someone else being knocked out) and move on as fast as possible before they wake up. It also makes a lot of usefull abilities of your characters unusable, since they are all lethal. But in the end I did it and managed to beat the mission without killing anyone.
Another possible badge was to make it through the mission without touching bushes, which are by far the most frequent and most useful hiding spot in the game. So this made me throw the whole approach to the mission out all over again. This approach required a lot more carefull manouvering. You can't touch bushes but you can kill people. So the approach often required killing guards one by one, hiding them in non-bush hiding spaces and moving through the map this way. One particular situation was exspecially tricky for this badge. The room has a single entry map through a door and two guards as the main obstacle. Guard A looks directly at the door half the time and directly at Guard B for the other half. Guard B just looks at Guard A all the time. The door has two rows of bushes nearby which lead directly to both guards so the usual approach is to get in both your guys when Guard A isn't looking, move through the bushes and kill both guards at the same time with your two men. But you can't hide in the bushes for the badge I was going for. The solution required very efficient timing. The Samurai got through the Door when Guard A wasn't looking, distracted Guard B so that he isn't looking at Guard A. Then he killed Guard A with a Shuriken while Guard B isn't looking and sprints to Guard B to kill him with a Katana. Required impeccable timing but it was possible. This badge was also successfully completed.
There were additional badges to get but the hardest one is generally the speedrun badge. The badge requires you to go through the mission in a set amount of time. While the timing limit is difficult it's not the hard part about the badge. The hard part was that reloading did not reset the time. That means you basically have to go through the entire mission in one go, without saving and loading to get the badge. And you have to be quick doing it. The cool thing of this badge was that the other badges basically trained you for it. The different techniques I had used to beat the previous badges perfectly trained me for the speedrun badge. The non-lethal badge trained me to learn the quickest way through most rooms without meticously taking out every guard, while the no-bushes badge forced me to addapt some different strategies which were harder to pull of than the standart approach but also a lot quicker to execute once you knew how to do them.
So in the end I can just recommend to try out the demo to everyone. It is really fun and I allready had more fun with it than with some complete games.
In case you don't know what the Commandos series is: The game basically gives you command of a squad of highly competent specialists and tasks you with infiltrating enemy bases and strongholds in various missions. Shadow Tactics itself plays in the transitional period of feudal japan with the war of the shogun. The game gives you command of five different agents: A samurai, a ninja, a geisha, a street girl and a sharpshooter.
If that sounds appealing to you, you should check out the demo they released. Yes, the game has an actual demo released before the game comes out on steam and gog. And you can download and play the first two mission of the game right now. The developers even said that the progress of the demo gets included in the main game when you start it.
If you want to know a bit more about the game I will share my personal impressions of the demo here: It's really good. I just played the first two missions of the demo but they are both really fun and allow for multiple ways for dealing with each situation. One thing I exspecially love about the demo is that it made me do something I had never done before: Score-attack.
I am a completionist in most games but I never really had the patience to replay the same mission over and over again to get additional achievements in any game. I just try and get as much as possible on my first time through and leave it at that.
This game changed that merely by the ability to play in several different ways and the clever incentive the game had. The game offers various badges and achievements for each mission. While the "speedrun" mission is availible in every mission the others seem to be mostly different for different missions. Which made it a lot of fun. When I played the first mission over for the first time I went for a non-lethal approach to the mission. And unlike other games non-lethal/lethal isn't merely a binary option of how much blood you want to see around the unmoving body you will be moving around afterwards. Enemies wake up from being knocked out and they do it pretty fast. Luckily they don't sound the alarm when waking up, which the game comments on by having them mutter about being embarrased for having gotten knocked out. But they do search each availible hiding spot in the vicinity which can get you into very big troubles. So the non-lethal approach to the mission was to knock people out, hide the bodies (Since guards do sound the alarm when they see someone else being knocked out) and move on as fast as possible before they wake up. It also makes a lot of usefull abilities of your characters unusable, since they are all lethal. But in the end I did it and managed to beat the mission without killing anyone.
Another possible badge was to make it through the mission without touching bushes, which are by far the most frequent and most useful hiding spot in the game. So this made me throw the whole approach to the mission out all over again. This approach required a lot more carefull manouvering. You can't touch bushes but you can kill people. So the approach often required killing guards one by one, hiding them in non-bush hiding spaces and moving through the map this way. One particular situation was exspecially tricky for this badge. The room has a single entry map through a door and two guards as the main obstacle. Guard A looks directly at the door half the time and directly at Guard B for the other half. Guard B just looks at Guard A all the time. The door has two rows of bushes nearby which lead directly to both guards so the usual approach is to get in both your guys when Guard A isn't looking, move through the bushes and kill both guards at the same time with your two men. But you can't hide in the bushes for the badge I was going for. The solution required very efficient timing. The Samurai got through the Door when Guard A wasn't looking, distracted Guard B so that he isn't looking at Guard A. Then he killed Guard A with a Shuriken while Guard B isn't looking and sprints to Guard B to kill him with a Katana. Required impeccable timing but it was possible. This badge was also successfully completed.
There were additional badges to get but the hardest one is generally the speedrun badge. The badge requires you to go through the mission in a set amount of time. While the timing limit is difficult it's not the hard part about the badge. The hard part was that reloading did not reset the time. That means you basically have to go through the entire mission in one go, without saving and loading to get the badge. And you have to be quick doing it. The cool thing of this badge was that the other badges basically trained you for it. The different techniques I had used to beat the previous badges perfectly trained me for the speedrun badge. The non-lethal badge trained me to learn the quickest way through most rooms without meticously taking out every guard, while the no-bushes badge forced me to addapt some different strategies which were harder to pull of than the standart approach but also a lot quicker to execute once you knew how to do them.
So in the end I can just recommend to try out the demo to everyone. It is really fun and I allready had more fun with it than with some complete games.