Stealth games, if you ask me, are a bit stupid. In fact, the term stupid doesn’t do justice to their inherent preposterousness and borderline obtuse behaviour, as your character crouches down like a bear in the woods, doing the side-crab shuffle for mile after virtual mile, because apparently – despite being some muscle clad badass weighed-down by weaponry – crouching makes you harder to see? Have you ever tried crouch-walking around in your day-to-day? If not, let me assure you, it does not make you harder to see. Everyone will spot you and they will mock you.
Then there’s the incoherent rules, with enemies spotting players lurking behind walls because, well, reasons. Maybe your vision didn’t have the right kind of vignette? And don’t get me started on goldfish brained henchmen on patrol who are not concerned that the three people they have been speaking to on a loop for the last twenty minutes have inexplicably disappeared. Thankfully, Shadow Tactics: Aiko’s Choice, is a stealth game that bucks the trend. Smart, challenging, and immaculately crafted, this is the kind of stealth based action I’ll crab-walk in the shadows for.
Played from a top-down isometric perspective, Shadow Tactics: Aiko’s Choice gives you control of a merry-band of iconic feudal-Japan archetypes. There’s a Ninja who can throw shuriken and clamber across rooftops, a heavily armoured Samurai who can go toe-to-toe with any foe, a kunoichi who can don disguises and murder death kill with only a hairpin, you get the idea.
Your team are tasked with protecting the Shogun, which usually means carefully and strategically stealth killing your way across immense and intricate levels. You are, for the most part, left to carve you own path across the environment, completing a few objectives on the way.
Shadow Tactics: Aiko’s Choice is a standalone expansion to 2016’s Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun. Released way back in 2021 on PC, this substantial expansion has now made its way to console around a year after Mimimi Games closed down.
Taking place towards the endgame of Blades of the Shogun, Aiko’s Choice unapologetically throws the player in at the deep end. Because of this, the storyline never lands – it’s hard to be invested when you honesty can’t remember any of the backstory that is being liberally referred to. Additionally, from the get-go, you have near every character, every ability, and every game mechanic at your disposal. It is overwhelming, and the developer makes little to accommodate to those, like me, who last played the original game some eight years ago.
As such, you really just have to figure things out as you go. Which, admittedly, isn’t for everyone. Indeed, considering the timescales between the original game’s release and this (again) standalone expansion, a new tutorial level, drip-feeding characters and concepts, would most certainly have been welcome. Yet, stick with it, persist, and you’ll be rewarded with one of the best stealth-strategy games out there.
It’s the clear rules of Shadow Tactics that sets it apart from many of its stealth contemporaries. Being able to see the view cone of any enemy with a click, or to know which foes on the entire map can see a certain location, is glorious. It’s a stealth game that doesn’t prat about, if an enemy can see your player character, then they see them, if they can’t, they can’t. Even better, your foes have just enough brains to make them interesting. Kill every soldier on a samurai’s path and they’ll soon get wise, going in search of the mysterious culprit.
Because of these coherent and well sigh-posted rules, you don’t get naffed off when you are spotted and everything goes to hell, you know that it’s because you went wrong and there will be an optimum way through that section, you just have to experiment to find it. That said, when you are spotted, it doesn’t mean it’s all over. Part of Shadow Tactics charm is when things get bombastic, you must think fast and improvise, hacking your way through foes and somehow emerging alive at the end.
The difficulty is steep in Aiko’s Choice, and progress is slow, but having an intelligent enemy who pushes back challenges you to best utilise your character’s abilities and tools. To have your varied heroes work together in perfect synchronicity. This is made easier thanks to the superb controls and display – if only every PC port could be this well thought through – and made enjoyable thanks to the sheer brilliance that is Shadows mode.
Shadows mode enables you to set a series of inputs and commands for every character. Then, with the tap of a button, you can see your finely honed plan carried out – there will be fist-pumps of delight when it works, sighs of despondency and a quick load when it doesn’t.
Seeing five different characters, all performing their contrasting actions together coherently, wiping out a host of enemies in one collective and fluid motion simply never gets old. As Hayoto leaps from a rooftop to pin down a foe lured by Yuki’s decoy, Aiko strikes under covering fire from the marksman Takuma, whilst Mugen fends off a pack of ambushers that you spotted lurking nearby. I’m not sure strategy video games get more satisfying than this.
