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Commandos-Like Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun - Commandos clone with ninjutsu theme

Darth Roxor

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Pity that first Desperados is unplayable with windows 8 (probably win 10 too).

Do you know if it works alright for Windows 7?

It does, but you need some workarounds to get it to werk properly.

https://af.gog.com/forum/desperados...enemy_view_cone_slow_down_issue?as=1649904300
http://steamcommunity.com/app/260730/discussions/0/540737262306815107/
Yeah ... I found that after my latest reformat and Win 7 reinstall, the game still runs choppy with cursor issues, basically unplayable :(

But have you tried these shits? Because when I played it earlier this year, it was also unplayable after a clean installation (cuz stuttering and cursor), but using those workarounds fixed everything for me.
 
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Zombra

An iron rock in the river of blood and evil
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But have you tried these shits? Because when I played it earlier this year, it was also unplayable after a clean installation (cuz stuttering and cursor), but using those workarounds fixed everything for me.
I don't remember exactly which fixes I tried, but there were some on gog and some on Steam, so maybe they're the same.

Will refer to your links next time I get the urge to replay it .... which probably won't be long :)

:bro:

So, if it runs, desperados 1 is the best?
YES. I don't know how I could be more clear. Don't bother playing the other ones at all.
 

adddeed

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YES. I don't know how I could be more clear. Don't bother playing the other ones at all.
Well the other ones can be fun as well. Desperados 2 plays like some sort of Alpha version of Shadow Tactics, but at the core its still enjoyable. Helldorado is Desperados 2 ++ and worth getting if you want more of this type of gameplay.
 
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Ludo Lense

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The nostalgia for Desperados is off the charts up in here. I think most people need to try to play it again. While it is a very good game with some truly unique stuff it suffers from serious pacing issues, an interface from hell and the fact that Kate is broken and you really have to restrain using her.

Shadows Tactics might have not the highest of the highs of Desperados but nowhere near the lows. It is a much smoother experience.

My biggest gripe with the gameplay is how arbitrary the abstractions are. Footsteps can appear in the snow which is cool but blood magically disappears after the kill animation or how only the old guy with the cane makes sound when running at full speed. The others can make a running leap at the guards and they won't turn around.

That and the knowing anything about the Edo Period and the end of Sengoku Period will cause some massive triggers. I have no idea why they choose to be so...anti-descriptive I guess?
 

Goral

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The nostalgia for Desperados is off the charts up in here. I think most people need to try to play it again. While it is a very good game with some truly unique stuff it suffers from serious pacing issues, an interface from hell and the fact that Kate is broken and you really have to restrain using her.
Lol, what? It's the opposite, Kate at least can't occupy the guards forever (sometimes for a very short time in fact) and there are also opponents who won't fall for her charms. Also, with Aiko you can easily kill a guard, he drops dead and if it's a striped area you can just stand there and no one will be the wiser and with women you can take the body from the scene because they do it crouched (no pun intended). Aiko is the most OP person on that team, followed by Mugen. Takuma was the most useless one, if not for the bombs you could as easily finish the game without him (on the last mission on hardcore difficulty there were two samurai facing each other, without it, killing them would be extremely difficult, maybe impossible even because there aren't any blind spots and they react almost immediately).

I also preferred more varied but shorter Desperados missions than missions in parts in ST.
 

Soph

Educated
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Apr 12, 2015
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Not a bad game so far(played first two levels), I'm not sure if the game is good or if I'm so utterly starved for these kind of games right now. Kind of shit they still can't get interiors to work the way they did in C2 though, although the compromise and solution they came with is not bad. There's a bit more verticality... which seems to make the game too easy. Sometimes you're sitting on a roof and the angle the guards look at you should cause a clear alarm, arbitrarily you can't be seen on rooftops when you are crouched though. Maybe they should have added a lie down ability to make that more realistic. It also feels fairly gamey.. the undergrowth doesn't rustle when you move through it, and one patch of grass can hold a lot of bodies.

I'll play some more later.
 
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Ludo Lense

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OP person

That is not how the game works :roll:

Every character is OP when you are doing the mission by any means necessary. Killing people is the strongest tactic in the game. However the high level gameplay begins when you try to do the badges especially the ones with restriction on who you can kill.

When doing the "No disguise" badge for village at night I left Aiko in the starting spot for the entire mission and did the entire thing with Yuki and Hayato, it was hard mode too.
 

Goral

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Every character is OP when you are doing the mission by any means necessary.
In many missions you could complete it while using 1 character only but on hardcore it takes way too much time because you have to have perfect timing (you start running the moment cone starts turning the opposite direction and sometimes it's still too slow). The only badge I can praise someone about is the speed run badge on hard. I wonder how many people got it. In my case most later missions I did in 2-3 hours, although most of the time I was trying not to raise the alarm. Often killing strawhats, raising the alarm and getting 3 redshirts makes missions go quicker than doing it silently. I was also too annoyed with the civilians at some point and started killing them, made my life much easier. It's a shame they can't be tied up though. It's also stupid that you can't kill a knocked down opponent unless you have a blade, WTF? The prison escape was much, much longer because of it. Throwing someone into a ravine also doesn't work most of the time (and sometimes you're really, real close to the ravine).
 

Darth Roxor

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i would say calling any character 'op' in a genre that is so ripe for breaking and abusing mechanics (which is by no means a bad thing) as this is a rather silly thing to say
 

MediantSamuel

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Just finished the game after 16 hours.

While I would've liked to have seen a new mechanic of sorts in the later levels I stilled thoroughly enjoyed myself with this game. I imagine I'll move onto the challenges at some point.

Definitely (imo) a worthy entry into the genre.
 

Darth Roxor

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General Okkoto leaves his tent all pissed, his men stand around with their guns raised and on the lookout for trubble.

I lob a TNT barrel right in front of the two samurai standing guard.

"HMMM, MUST HAVE BEEN THE WIND"

Seriously? :lol: I would expect them to at least RUN THE FUCK AWAY :lol:
 
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Ludo Lense

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General Okkoto leaves his tent all pissed, his men stand around with their guns raised and on the lookout for trubble.

I lob a TNT barrel right in front of the two samurai standing guard.

"HMMM, MUST HAVE BEEN THE WIND"

Seriously? :lol: I would expect them to at least RUN THE FUCK AWAY :lol:

There are some interactions that the game doesn't mention and they don't really make a lot of sense. That is one. Another is how civilians react if (and this is a guess) there are no guards when the wake up and are far away from their normal spot. Then they run towards the nearest house and disappear. Handy for non-lethal kills but completely obtuse.


On another note. I HATE TORCHES THIS MUCH. I have been screwed so many times on the penultimate map while doing badges because some patrol from halfway across the map sees there is a random torch not lit and the rush to blaze it up, ruining all my carefully laid plans with their presence.
 

HansDampf

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Just finished it. I always try to avoid detection and found the last couple of missions to be quite challenging. Can't say there are any blatantly "op" characters like Sanchez in Desperados for example (just send him into an occupied building and watch the chaos unfold). But they could have been more specialized. Four of the five characters have melee attacks, and three of them can climb on vines and use hookshots.

Some annoyances:
1) Why can't Mugen and Hayato drag bodies like the girls?
2) An option to click behind stuff would have been nice. It's sometimes hard enough to find the perfect camera angle for everything, and trying to send someone to a spot that is hidden behind a roof or worse, some interactive element that the cursor snaps to, can be a hassle.
3) Using shadow mode it wasn't always clear to me whether a character would perform the desired action running, walking or sneaking.
4) Load times...

Also, the devs must have played too much Dishonored. I can accept this as a game mechanic, but it's so illogical that they are basically invisible here.
 

rezaf

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I wonder if I'm all alone out there with liking this kind of game in principle, but feeling a bit overwhelmed with the implementation as the game tags on.
For example, I thought the first few levels in Shadow Tactics were great fun, but by level 8 I felt there were too many artificial barriers - you have skills that can affect enemies in various ways, but levels are filled to the brim with enemies immune to those abilities, with only a token few thrown in to remind you the abilities even exist. All enemies are watched by at least 2 other enemies and some patrols to boot, hiding spots get rare ... everything is a series of puzzles which have only one solution (or maybe a few other with the developers did not forsee).
This approach to level design sucks most fun I could have out of the game for me.

The best compromise in my book was the original Men of War with some of the expendalones, it had a couple of commando-like levels (or parts of levels), but in other times it was about armies fighting in which the individual soldier was expendable.
Are there any games like that I might have overlooked?

As for Shadow Tactics, I seem to still be 5 levels short of the end, is there any point in pressing on or will everything just get puzzlier and puzzlier? I'm in level 9.
 
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Ludo Lense

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I wonder if I'm all alone out there with liking this kind of game in principle, but feeling a bit overwhelmed with the implementation as the game tags on.
For example, I thought the first few levels in Shadow Tactics were great fun, but by level 8 I felt there were too many artificial barriers - you have skills that can affect enemies in various ways, but levels are filled to the brim with enemies immune to those abilities, with only a token few thrown in to remind you the abilities even exist. All enemies are watched by at least 2 other enemies and some patrols to boot, hiding spots get rare ... everything is a series of puzzles which have only one solution (or maybe a few other with the developers did not forsee).
This approach to level design sucks most fun I could have out of the game for me.

The best compromise in my book was the original Men of War with some of the expendalones, it had a couple of commando-like levels (or parts of levels), but in other times it was about armies fighting in which the individual soldier was expendable.
Are there any games like that I might have overlooked?

As for Shadow Tactics, I seem to still be 5 levels short of the end, is there any point in pressing on or will everything just get puzzlier and puzzlier? I'm in level 9.

Puzzle-like single solution on maps designed to replayed again for different play-style achievements :M

You will probably hate the last mission which is packed with Samurai and Straw-Hats.

I liked it because it forced me to do some make some matrix-style tricks with every tool at my disposal, all character were doing shadow mode most of the time.
 
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adddeed

Arcane
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I wonder if I'm all alone out there with liking this kind of game in principle, but feeling a bit overwhelmed with the implementation as the game tags on.
For example, I thought the first few levels in Shadow Tactics were great fun, but by level 8 I felt there were too many artificial barriers - you have skills that can affect enemies in various ways, but levels are filled to the brim with enemies immune to those abilities, with only a token few thrown in to remind you the abilities even exist. All enemies are watched by at least 2 other enemies and some patrols to boot, hiding spots get rare ... everything is a series of puzzles which have only one solution (or maybe a few other with the developers did not forsee).
This approach to level design sucks most fun I could have out of the game for me.

The best compromise in my book was the original Men of War with some of the expendalones, it had a couple of commando-like levels (or parts of levels), but in other times it was about armies fighting in which the individual soldier was expendable.
Are there any games like that I might have overlooked?

As for Shadow Tactics, I seem to still be 5 levels short of the end, is there any point in pressing on or will everything just get puzzlier and puzzlier? I'm in level 9.
Youre playing the wrong game then if you want Men of War type of gameplay. Men of War is tactical RTS, those Commandos-lite levels are there to change up the pace a bit. Shadow Tatics is completely different in gameplay and design.

Play Soldiers Heores of WWII and Faces of War, Codename Panzers, Ground Control, World in Conflict, Blitzkreig etc.
 

Darth Roxor

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Another is how civilians react if (and this is a guess) there are no guards when the wake up and are far away from their normal spot. Then they run towards the nearest house and disappear. Handy for non-lethal kills but completely obtuse.

I'd say it makes perfect sense and I lol'd when I saw it for the first time. Another thing concerning civilians that is handy but not mentioned anywhere is that you can knock them out and then hide them inside houses, after which they won't leave again.

they could have been more specialized. Four of the five characters have melee attacks, and three of them can climb on vines and use hookshots.

My biggest gripe for the moment is with Aiko. On a map like Kage-sama's camp, which doesn't have a disguise, she's basically reduced to a sneeze powder bot - all her other abilities are shared with Hayato and Yuki.

For example, I thought the first few levels in Shadow Tactics were great fun, but by level 8 I felt there were too many artificial barriers - you have skills that can affect enemies in various ways, but levels are filled to the brim with enemies immune to those abilities, with only a token few thrown in to remind you the abilities even exist. All enemies are watched by at least 2 other enemies and some patrols to boot, hiding spots get rare ... everything is a series of puzzles which have only one solution (or maybe a few other with the developers did not forsee).

I liek all this, especially the cross-viewing guards, makes the game harder to cheese. My fav part so far was probably Kanazawa City, and the straw hats on the walls - 4 groups of 2 straw hats in inconvenient places, not only watched on and off by a handful of dudes from below, but also every now and again visited by 2 samurai who check if they're still around. It was a very well set-up barrier.
 

rezaf

Cipher
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Messages
650
Play Soldiers Heores of WWII and Faces of War, Codename Panzers, Ground Control, World in Conflict, Blitzkreig etc.

I specifically mentioned MoW because Soldiers: HoWW2 is basically it's direct predecessor, yet the game feels totally different and I pretty much hated it. Maybe I have strange tastes?

However, I might very well be playing the wrong game as you say - but like I mentioned, I really enjoyed Shadow Tactics up until Level 7. Level 8 was the besieged castle, and I tried time and time again to "solve" the puzzle until I finally went with "fuck preventing alarms", caused half a dozen of them in quick succession, killing off some of the overlapping guards in the process. Only then did I get to the last part of the level and blew up the samurai general with some dynamite. The level took me almost 4 hours and I had a reload count of almost 200. Go figure. :oops:

Edit: I'm currently having fun watching a few youtubers struggle with the same problems I struggled with. What caused me to tear my hair out when I was playing makes me chuckle when other players have to do it.
In the last video, the player ended up killing a civilian after he had thwarted his brilliant plan by spotting him for the umpteenth time. :lol:
 
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