This is pretty much Commandos but in a more interesting setting, better story and characters. You form a small squad of specialists working for the Shogun to restore peace in the region. The characters are somewhat stereotypical, but in this game it's mostly a strength since you pretty much know what a character can do just from the archetype. The Samuraij is the most powerfull warrior, the ninja is agile and good at silent takedowns, the geisha, can disguie herself to create distractions. It's pretty much the same skills you had in Commandos. If you played those games, you will have a much easier time, and you will probably need it. The game is hard if you don't know what you are doing and understand the mechanics of the game. Mostly because there is no way to pause the action and issue commands and then unpause like in many tactical RPGs. But it's never unfair. If you fail it's always your own fault, and there is always an alternate solution to a problem. If you constantly fail, try something new.

The characters are balanced, an all have their uses. For example the ninja and the samuraij can carry bodies faster, but the thief and the geisha are less visible when they move them (and the old sharpshooter can't move bodies at all). All the skills are varied and all have their own uses and work slightly different. The ninja can make enemies look in a different direction by throwing rocks, the thief can lure them from their post or patroll route and so on and the samuraij have a bottle of sake that guards will go and pick up (because all the guards are apperently drunks that go pick up discarded bottles of booze) and the sharpshooter have a adorable pet tanuki that he can send out that distract guards. The game will be much easier when you know how different skills work, it's still not a easy game (and I can't for the life of me understand how you are suposed to do the speedruns on some of the levels) but you will be much less frustrated if you know how each character work.

There are some minor issues, it's more things that could be improved for a sequal rather than actual problems.
Sometimes the game doesn't really understand where you are trying to click, especially in regards to different heights on the map and since the camera also only rotates in 90 degrees intervalls, this makes it somewhat cumbersome sometimes to correctly move around. A free rotating camera would be very nice to have.

The system where you can set up an action for each character and then simultaniously execute them, is great but rather limited. For example, have the rifleman shot a samuraij, and then have the ninja preform a backstab to finish him of while the geisha throws a blinding bomb on a guard so he cant' see whats happening is awesome when you manage to pull it off, but it would be great if you could key more actions together or set up waypoints to time it better.

Finaly, a multiplayer function would be great but that would probably throw the difficulty balance off somewhat, since you could have one player controling each character, making coordinating actions much easier.

A very stong recomendation. One of the best games from last year.