Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew не просто повторяє ідеальну формулу попередніх ігор студії Mimimi, а й дещо її змінює, додаючи значно більше свободи. Щоправда, через це стало трохи менше "сценарності" на кожному рівні, однак воно того було варте, адже коли виходить зробити якийсь злагоджений ланцюжок подій — це сприймається лише як ваша заслуга, а не як задум розробників.

Єдиною справжньою прикрістю є те, що Shadow Gambit — це остання гра від розробників, які відродили жанр стелс-тактики і стабільно розвивали його протягом останніх 8-ми років. Втім, ця деталь ніяк не заважає мені рекомендувати цю гру усім, незалежно від того знайомі ви з жанром чи ні.

Повний огляд можна прочитати тут: https://playua.net/propuskaty-zaboroneno-oglyad-shadow-gambit-the-cursed-crew/

Super bon jeu qui m'a définitivement envie de jouer aux autres jeux du même studio (qui a malheureusement fermé car c'est un monde de merde).
C'était mon premier jeu dans cette formule un peu étrange de stratégie en temps réel et de furtivité et c'était génial, en plus j'adore les pirates.
Les personnages sont tous cools et ont tous leurs petites pattes a apporter aux gameplays, et partir faire une mission avec une équipe adaptée c'est vraiment satisfaisant. Ce que les devs ont d'ailleurs bien compris en affublant a chaques iles et chaques missions des succès plus ou moins compliqués qui font plaisir a découvrir une fois le jeu terminé.
Malgré ça, j'ai trouvé qu'il manquait deux ou trois îles uniques, mais je penses que c'est surtout parce que j'avais pas envie de m'arreter de jouer.

Shadow Gambit was the first of Mimimi's Stealth-Tactics games I ve played and while it definitely has its moments, I did not stick with it in the end.

To get some of the smaller stuff out of the way - Shadow Gambit's character designs are really strong (love the MC with her sword stored in her chest), supported by gorgeous animations, it is wasted on a story that is extremely wordy without every being interesting or even charming, all of your crew members are very one-note stereotype, and the main conflict did not pull me in enough to care about paragraph's worth of pirate ship lore.

But thats now what I was looking for here anyway, I was looking for great stealth gameplay. Why that didnt fully work for me had a lot to do with the fact that Shadow Gambit is a stealth game with a pause function (during which you can perfectly "premove" your characters and their abilities for them to execute when you unpause) and perfect information (there is no fog of war, patrols are set in stone, line of sights clearly communicated, etc.) which meant that all of the challenge lies in the planning of your moves, not in the execution.

Which in turn meant for me that every situation is only fun to encounter once.

The first time I kill three guards at once by perfectly positioning my crew is cool. The second time is routine. The first time I combine the Anchor pulling an enemy's body into the ground without leaving a trace with the golden hook pulling my crewmate back into a bush, creating a perfect crime, no body, no witnesses, it felt amazing. The second time around it was just a thing I knew how to do.

This puts an unsustainable amount of pressure on the Level design to constantly provide me new situations to solve. No game could keep that pace up, and while Shadow Gambit's attempt is valiant, it ultimately could not keep me hooked.

Shadow Gambit proves to be yet another great tactical stealth game made by Mimimi, who are one of the best stealth game devs in the business. It also proves, unfortunately, to be an excellent swan song for Mimimi as they announced that they would be closing after support ends for the game in the coming months. (Just the day after I beat the game early this week too) It truly is a shame because as I said they’re among the best in the business of the genre and really are like the only ones that do the isometric style stealth tactics ala Commandos. The silver lining at least is that this was on their own terms and hopefully they can move on to achieve better work/life balance.

Anyway I do think that among their games, which also include Shadow Tactics and Desperadoes 3, Shadow Gambit is the best one. It definitely feels like an even more polished refinement like Desperadoes 3 was to Shadow Tactics. There are some differences, one of the major ones being is that the game is more freeform. Shadow Tactics and Desperadoes were more like puzzles to solve, observing enemy visions cones, and figuring out openings to take them out with your character skills. Usually in those games there was more a rigid order you had to approach them in, especially because the game picked the characters for a level for you. Shadow Gambit eventually chooses to let you choose any crew member you want on missions and they have all wildly different powers. Shadow Tactics and Desperadoes were mostly grounded aside from Isabelle’s voodoo ability to kill two enemies at once. In contrast, as the title implies, the crew in Shadow Gambit are all undead pirates and they all have more fantastical abilities. Because the cast have more wacky powers and the game lets you choose your crew roster, the game is easier in a sense, but it does give you more freedom to play how you want. You can also choose which missions you want to complete first, unlike the previous two games which were completely linear. In Shadow Gambit you revisit each island to complete different missions, but they have it where a mission will just take you to certain area of the island, while another takes you to a different part so it keeps it fresh enough. I think the tradeoff of the gameplay is ultimately worth it because the supernatural powers are fun and they really take the abilities from previous games into fun directions.

The writing is actually rather good too, like the characters initially seem rather one note but the last half of the game is essentially doing each character’s personal sidequests and they all do mostly a nice job fleshing them out. The setting is a neat one; funny enough it’s actually a bit annoying to me because the game legit has good lore tidbits that are teased at and drip-fed at you throughout the game but they never delve into them too much. I’d actually would have liked more exploration of them, but that’s less of a con and more that they did a good enough job where I was interested to want to see more. Teresa’s sidequest especially has some real neat lore and character stuff with ramifications that explain the entire villain faction of the game that’s just kind of mentioned in passing.

Overall Shadow Gambit is a fantastic game and one of my favorites of the year. I wish Mimimi was able to keep improving on their formula, but they should be proud they went out on such a high note.

Mimimi has been carefully iterating on the stealth tactics genre with each game they've released and Shadow Gambit has been an incredibly enjoyable refinement of everything they've done to date - making an almost perfect isometric Hitman-esque murder puzzle game.

Positives:
- By going with a more fantastical, magical setting, they've managed to create 8 different characters with really fun novel abilities that haven't been fully possible in the more 'grounded' characters in previous releases.
- The way the game positively encourages you to play benched characters, to force you into getting out of a strategic rut, is pleasant and in combination with them all feeling enjoyable to play, its made the game feel fresher than other games of this type.
- The incorporation of the quick save/quick load mechanic into the story is nifty!

Neutral:
- The game is a fair bit shorter than Shadow Tactics and Desperados 3. While I'd like to have more islands and more missions, this also means it doesn't outstay its welcome which might be good as there's limited enemy variety. and I definitely felt myself slowly losing some of the fun towards the end.

Negative:
- While I like the characters, the dialogue barks when characters move are incredibly tiring. But if this is the thing which sticks out most negatively, the game is doing a good job otherwise.

Has the strong tactical gameplay and varied characters similar to Mimimi's previous games, with a new bafflingly terrible mission structure that starts to make the game a chore to complete.

Shadow Gambit takes the gameplay of Shadow Tactics and Desperados 3 to a new setting, this one focused on undead/cursed pirates fighting against a tyrannical order that is trying to destroy them and control the citizens of various islands. As a pirate looking to make a name for herself you free a captured sentient ship from the inquisition with the hope of finding the former Captain's hidden treasure. To do that you have to join forces with the ship, who has the ability to record events and move time back to those former spots, and revive her former crew in order to follow the clues left by the Captain.

In the base game there is a total of eight playable characters with an extra unlockable one if you reach 80% completion by doing different stage and character challenges. Each character has a slow or fast kill/knockout attack with their weapon of choice, a pistol that has one shot per map unless you find ammo, and usually two other abilities with often one of them changing to something else under certain conditions or when something else is in use. One of the more unique characters has the ability to possess other enemies and can then move them within a certain range of where he took over their bodies and he might gain some of their abilities, one character can grow a bush almost anywhere on the map to hide characters or enemy bodies, one has a cannon she can use to launch allies to distant places or that can be used to attack enemies, many characters have a item or animal partner that allows them to distract or lure enemies to a location. The crews various skills can pair together in useful ways and can allow you to handle locations in different ways. The characters are also likable and have their personalities brought out by their banter during gameplay, having some unique dialogue based on who is chosen to go on certain missions, story elements on your ship in between missions, and in the later game a mission or series of missions that focuses on some part of a character's backstory.

You play against the usual types of enemies the the genre has become known for having. You have the generic grunts that are easy to fool with distractions and traps, sentries that won't move or be distracted long from their set locations and line of sight, one that activates an alarm to summon reinforcements, a sniper with a longer and more quick to activate line of sight, a stronger types that requires multiple characters to take down, and in a new more setting unique enemy a pair of two enemies that need to be killed quickly before one revives the other. You have the helpful time stopping planning button found in their previous games that allows you to chain multiple actions together and the always nice to have fast forward button that Desperados 3 had so you aren't needlessly waiting around for enemies to get into certain positions or for alarms and alerts to end.

In this genre Shadow Gambit would be of the same excellent quality of the developers previous games, if not for suffering from one area that those previous games didn't struggle with.

The game unfortunately becomes something of a chore to finish, even more so with the DLC, due to the constant need to replay the same locations with little changes 3-5+ times. Even with the ability to bring a different set of crew members and to start and finish in different locations the repeated visits to the same maps is easily the worst part of this game. It's so bad you might get into a situation where you have to go to the same map 3+ times in a row. In Shadow Tactics and Desperados 3 a map was designed for the mission and characters it was made for (Desperados 3 eventually giving modes where you could try different characters), the maps here are made to play for multiple missions where almost nothing changes except for the minor mission objective targets or the time of day (a much bigger change than just about anything the objectives will do). Many of the missions will focus on you really only needing to complete your objectives around a portion of the total location with you being able to pick from a few starting locations and exit locations once your tasks are complete. The problem with the approach is that it leads to some very short uninteresting missions in the worst times, but there is also the problem that they didn't necessarily spread out how those missions tend to limit themselves. You might play a mission that focus on a third of the map, only to find your next mission focuses on pretty much the same area of the map, then to find you have another mission on the island that now deals with 2/3s or the entire map that again will have you dealing with that same 1/3 all with the same enemy groupings and locations. There being a lot more playable characters and being able to take the 1-3 you want to each time does help to alleviate some of this problem, but it still ends up getting dull as you end up playing a lot more total missions than in Minimi's previous games, less interesting missions, much less challenging missions, and the types of enemies you are facing doesn't really expand as the game goes on.

The challenge badges for each map and crew member are a lazily handled mess where it is needlessly difficult to check your progress or what you have done on the revealed badges, the logbook is a mess that you can't even access for some reason while on the mission planning screen, some badges just don't seem to want to unlock when you complete them, and the challenges aren't all revealed until you complete the game. Because you really want to go back to that one map you just played six times, however many more times to try to hit a ridiculously high 80% badge completion rate to unlock a hidden character so you can play the same maps some more times with them.

Both sets of DLC adds a new character, giving you total of 11 playable characters with the additional unlockable one, one new location that will have three missions on it and three new missions on the older locations. The characters are both fun to use but the new islands tend to only have one mission on them that is actually interesting and the other three missions mean you will be going back to areas you've already played even more than you have to in the base game. If you are really playing the game a lot and see yourself frequently replaying missions or just really like having the varied characters then they are going to be worth getting just for that.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1779332521110691961
Video: https://youtu.be/l2mPhZSk5dc?si=kceIF0gjE0bhbcXe

Another wonderful, and unfortunately final, game from Mimimi Games. Following in the footsteps of their other two real-time tactical strategy gems Desperados III and Shadow Tactics, this game takes those ideas and expands them with a huge cast of eccentric undead pirates as you explore islands searching for treasure and ghostly mysteries.

The voice acting is all extremely fun and adds a lot to the world and some of the personal stories for each pirate are as surprisingly touching as they are charming. The gameplay, like the others Mimimi excels at, is sharp and refined, giving you full control over how to stealthily take down your enemies without ever raising an alarm. The thrill of setting up a complex multi-character plan and pulling it off without a hitch always feels super satisfying.

The games have always been very upfront about save-scumming being integral to the overall way to enjoy the game by trying new tactics if something goes awry, but the story here manages to incorporate a reason for it happen since the plotline has more fantastical/magical elements to it. It's a welcome little addition!

There are not enough islands to explore so it starts to feel a bit repetitive in the back half. Also, although the giant cast is great, it hurts the overall story with less focus. The side stories are also cute but ultimately worthless. They add nothing other than some simple backstory, which is mostly annoying to get through as it's just busywork with paragraphs of dialog. Desperados III used mo-cap for cutscenes and it hurts to see it absent here, replaced with still images (that are very pretty!) and voiceover.

It's a shame then that Mimimi is closing shop, but they'll always has these fantastic games for all to play. The DLC and post game content here has legs, so you'll not be wanting. A stellar way to end their time in the video game field, but here's hoping we'll see them again one day.

I'm devastated to hear about the upcoming closure of Mimimi - while I understand and respect their decisions regarding this, simply no one else in the industry is doing it like they are and they will be dearly missed. This announcement was made between me finishing Shadow Gambit and writing this review, so I thought I would mention it at the beginning.

Shadow Gambit is Mimimi's third (now final) real-time-tactics title, following 2016's Shadow Tactics and 2020's Desperados III. Both titles are very dear to me and I've sunk many hours into both. Absolutely love what they've done with the genre and I believe Desperados III is very likely the peak. They have contributed so much to both RTT and stealth games that I believe they will be remembered and appreciated forever for fans of these two genres.

So, I wish that I enjoyed Shadow Gambit a lot more than I did. Don't get me wrong, it's still a great game - fun to play and wonderfully polished, just like their previous titles, but it was just missing something that made the other 2 click far more for me.

A think a lot of it comes down to the level and mission design having a very different philosophy from ST and D3 - whereas those games had a set selection of playable characters for each level and thus designed each map around their specific strengths and weaknesses, Shadow Gambit has a much more open design. Since you are able to resurrect the members of the Red Marley's crew in any order you wish, every mission and map must accommodate any combination of these characters. As a result, the maps in Gambit feel a lot less meticulous and purposeful in their design - since there's any combination of 8 different characters required to design for, some of which are absurdly overpowered, maps feel slightly blander and more generic.

Additionally, where the previous titles were linear in the most literal sense of the word, distinct levels that you play one at a time, Gambit is again open to player choice. It's not open world per-se, but instead of 15-20 unique maps, with maybe a couple reused at different times of day, Gambit has a total of ten maps, reused up to four times each, and despite the main differences between replays being time of day, enemy placement doesn't change? A handful of specific optional missions shake up the enemy placements, but I found it honestly absurd that enemy placement doesn't change in levels you're made to replay up to three to four times.

As a result, playing through the same maps over and over with minute changes gets old very quickly. In the previous titles I was excited to see what the next mission had in store for me. In Gambit, it's like - "Oh, I have to play Dread Vine's Cove for the fourth time." The only maps not reused multiple times - Gran Alacazar (this one is reused once for an optional mission with significant changes) and, to avoid spoilers, simply the final mission - are absolutely the best ones in the game and the two I had the most fun clearing.

Not helping the pace of things is the story, which I tried earnestly to get into, but quickly found myself not caring. I think Mimimi was trying to do a Hades thing, where after each mission you'd return to the Red Marley as your home base and learn more about its wacky cast of characters before heading back out, but the writing and presentation are just not here. Characters have a single visual-novel style portrait that doesn't animate, emote, anything - and just stand there in the middle of the screen as text boxes (voiced at least, and pretty well at that) go by. I know that's a lot of work but it doesn't help it feeling more like a monotonous interruption than something to get invested in. The characters themselves are just alright too - very tropey and generic feeling, sometimes a little too wacky and goofy for me to take a serious interest in the plot.

Gameplay is as good as ever in Mimimi's titles - the one thing I can absolutely say without question regarding Gambit is that is is fun to play. The playable characters have more abilities and things to do than ever, to the point where they feel so overpowered that they have to COVER the map in enemies to make things challenging. Characters like John Mercury and Suleidy are so powerful they're capable of soloing the maps, and when put together in a team it's more of a bloodbath than a stealth mission. Every character feels totally unique from each other and the game does a fantastic job of rewarding you for mixing up your team rather than using the same guys for every mission.

As a single compliment to its story - and trying to avoid spoilers as much as possible - it does use game mechanics to get very meta with the plot a few times, and it's a big surprise and handled in a super cool and interesting way. If you know you know - loved that moment in Gran Alacazar.

I don't know what else to say really - it's fun and I had an overall good time actually playing Shadow Gambit, but it's often very monotonous and repetitive. It's in a sort of weird spot, theoretically it has more replay value than the previous titles by exploring different combinations of characters, but at the same time you get to experiment on very boring, repetitive, samey looking islands, while being interrupted by the visual novel cutscenes every time you return to base. It's a total mixed bag and has a lot of new experiments and ideas they were toying with, most of which do not work for me.

I'm incredibly saddened by the end of Mimimi, because I think a sequel to Shadow Gambit would genuinely be able to fix most of the issues I had with it. With an established cast, more work could've been put into more diverse level design and more polish into the story scenes - but I suppose we'll never know what a sequel could've brought. Still a good time, but its more open design philosophy ended up hurting it more than helping it, I think.

If this was the first Mimimi game I'd played, I'd probably be a lot more positive to it. The gameplay and controls are as solid as any other and include all the improvements that came with Desperados 3. But as a continuation of this "series", I'm not thrilled. Instead of huge maps, we now get smaller maps that we only visit a fraction of in each mission. It's a lot easier than the other games, something I'm guessing comes from the fact that you can here play with any character you choose and each mission has to be completable with them. So a lot of the design that was in the previous games is sorely lacking here. It all feels so generic and almost randomly generated. And there's way to much faff going on between the missions. Constantly walking from character to character to talk to them and progress a story I care nothing about. All I wanted was about 9 huge missions that were designed with your set loadout in mind. Instead I got almost the complete opposite. As far as the genre goes, they still know what they're doing, I just don't hope this is the direction their games will follow in the future. At least just keep it to this franchise and give us a Desperados 4 that's more like its prequel than this.