Recent reviews by Engioc

Artdink are an extremely bad developer that clearly only cares about its Japanese market, and make zero effort for the English language version. The vast majority of trains are missing, as well as other content that exists in the Japanese version but is stripped out for the English version. From Atrain 9 v3.0, 4.0, and now 5.0, there is very little difference, and as of right now the game struggles to even launch without first lowering all the graphical options to low because Artdink couldn't be bothered future proofing this game despite the fact they just released a DLC for it.

Chances are none of the issues with this game or franchise will ever be resolved, because as I said Artdink have shown time and time again that they simply don't care about the English language version at all. Avoid this game, it has some really nice unique features, but they are buried under a trashy developer.

Desperados III has easily been one of my favourite games since it released, and I’ll say right now I highly recommend this game to anyone that loves the real time tactics genre and specifically the Commandos style of games, or any lover of good strategy. If you’ve never played a game like this before it may take some getting used to, but if you keep pushing and learning you’ll be rewarded with a fantastic game.

The story is simple, nothing groundbreaking, but serves its purpose providing the motivation/reasons for the actions you take in each mission and does enough to keep you interested in seeing how it all unfolds.

Each mission map is well designed, you will visit small and large towns, a train holdup, swamps, mines, mansions and more, plenty of variety and very fitting for a western themed game. The difficulty gradually ramps up with each mission, there’s plenty of “accident” kill opportunities and other creative ways to achieve primary and any secondary objectives, all maps having additional badges/challenges providing some replay value. These challenges range from things such as only using certain characters to complete the mission, speedruns, not using any cover, and several other ways to push you to find another way through the mission.

Each of the 5 characters is well thought out, Cooper is the allrounder with a knife and dual pistols, Hector as the big strong man of the crew, Doc the sniper, Kate using her charms to distract or lure enemies to their death, and Isabelle with some magical abilities. To be honest, Isabelle can be somewhat OP at times, but the game is still fun with her in it, and still challenging on higher difficulty levels.

The difficulty levels seem well done with beginner being the easiest, normal, hard, and desperado level being the hardest. Difficulty is ramped up by adding some additional enemies to the map, changing out simple cowboys for tougher NPC’s, or NPC’s that can’t be distracted.

Graphics and sound are excellent, they’ve really done justice to the wild west, from the dusty wind-swept desert, the bright lights and noise of the city, to the slushy swamps. You leave footprints as you move through the dry sand or wet mud, and noise as you slush about in the wet swamp that can alert your enemies to your presence, or used as a tool to lure them to their demise. If you decide to go loud and use your guns, you’ll see a visual radius indicator of the guns range and who will hear it, so deciding when its safe to get loud is relatively easy.

Alarms system is also good, rather than the entire map going on alert if you get spotted, as it did in Commandos, in this game there are separate sectors/zones where an alarm is triggered, so only that part of the map goes on alert, with additional enemies being deployed.

Controls, I never had any issues with the controls in this game, and if you dislike the default key binds you can always change them to whatever you prefer. Sometimes there can be small issues where a view cone is not 100% accurate, but in my experience, this occurs in all games in this genre, but I would stress this is a very minor issue and 99% of the time the view cones work perfectly. The showdown mode is also excellent, allowing you to easily plan out actions for each of your team members, at times I was taking down 8 enemy units with one showdown mode, and feels very rewarding.

Bugs, well there really isn’t much to say here, there are a few minor issues I’ve noticed, but on the whole Mimimi have put out some high-quality games with very few bugs, and Desperados III is no exception.

I think for me one of the big reasons I’ve loved all the games from Mimimi in this genre is the fact that they focused on something other than WW2, and the vast majority of games in this genre do focus on WW2. This fact only makes it all the more sad that Mimimi have stopped making games, at least for now, and there are very few developers that strived for the level of quality that Mimimi did, a developer I will very much miss.

There is also The Baron's Challenges, these add some additional replay value as it allows you to replay all the main story maps but change the characters you use, letting you experiment and find new ways to complete each mission. On to of that, there is a mission editor included, for details on how to use it check out the developers page on Steam, this basically allows you to position enemy units on each of the existing maps and create new challenges for yourself to then play through.

The Money for the Vultures DLC is also worth getting, it's only 3 missions but adds two new maps that are fun to play, and includes all of the existing characters and mechanics of the main story missions.

In summary, again, I would highly recommend this game to anyone. Great visuals, great sound, good controls, good story, a very enjoyable game.

Long story short, yes I would recommend this game, but....

The maps are great visually, very gloomy and grim, but nothing wrong with that. Lots of nice details, I like how they continually expand and become much larger. Chapter 6 was the most enjoyable of the lot, followed by 5, and then 4.

I liked the use of environmental sounds to mask kills with guns/knives etc, the bombings, and thunder were excellent, would like to see this used more in future games. On the other hand, I feel like accident kills are under used in this game, and often the effort required to reach the trigger point is more than they are worth and I had often already kill the intended targets before reaching that trigger point.

Although as I previously said I enjoyed the effort to make a harder game, and I enjoyed Commandos BCD for that reason, I have mixed feelings about how that extra difficulty was achieved. To me, there should be some middle ground between the simplistic search performed in most stealth games, to 63 Days where they can sprint to your exact location from across the map, despite the fact nobody saw me go there since no view cones activated. Again, I enjoy the game being difficult, but for me this also broke any sense of realism every time it happened. So this feature gives me mixed feelings, difficult yes, realistic no, and it feels like a bit of a cheesy way of making the game more difficult.

Another feature that gives me mixed feelings is that maps, especially the early ones, do often feeling quite linear in terms of the viable path forward. I know we have drains, vents, pipes, etc to get around parts of the map, but even with those this game feels much more restrictive than ST or D3 where you always have multiple paths that most of your characters can use, and multiple ways to kill or achieve the main objective. Being linear alone isn't necessarily a bad thing, and I did appreciate the optional secondary objectives. I also like that each map did allow for different styles of play, some of the earlier ones I could gun and run, others like chapter 6 much more stealthy.

I also feel in this and also War Mongrels that I never felt like I was fully utilising showdown mode. This isn't a complete negative, and sorry to keep comparing your game with the Mimimi games, but with less characters it also makes showdown mode feel less satisfying to use. At most you're only taking down 3 enemies, and if I compare that with D3 where at times I was taking down 8 at a time, well 63 Days just feels less satisfying.

I also hate that highlight is continually being turned off and I don't understand why that needs to happen. I remember from and earlier post I made on this topic it was suggested that highlight was somehow linked to another key control other than the one I assign it to "H", and it seems odd and unnecessary that pressing another control would turn it off. I don't know if this was meant to create difficulty, but to me it just creates annoyance having to continually turn it back on. It's not difficult, its just annoying, the maps are gloomy and it can be hard to see without highlights on.

I do like the gloomy gritty nature of the story you are telling, much more so than we ever saw in the Commandos games, but I would agree with some other comments I saw here where I'd like to see someone break away from WW2 in this genre. I think for me one of the things that stood out with Mimimi is they were the only ones not doing WW2 themed games. WW2 is an important part of history of course, but Commandos BEL/BCD, 2, and 3, Partisans 1941, War Mongrels, and now 63 Days all cover WW2, and of course there are dozens of other games in other genres that cover this period. For me, WW2 much like the current craze for adding zombies to every game is becoming old and tired. I still enjoy WW2 games, but I wish developers would break away from WW2 and do something different, or at least give some attention to the pacific theatre which is barely ever covered in games. Sure, Mimimi did Japan, but that was feudal Japan, not WW2.

Overall I enjoyed the game, I might attempt some of the challenges, but not sure if I'll be coming back to this as often as I did was other games in this genre. Despite the negatives I do recommend this game to others.

If you are looking for a casual game, this might be for you, but for anyone looking for a management game with depth, and challenge, this isn't it.

- The game mechanics are very simplistic, single level building, limited choices in styles and objects to place, disasters are also nothing special.

- In terms of the events, these are incredibly unrealistic, staff and guest demands are just rediculous with staff asking for time off to play games, to guests threatening to deliberately block the toilets, and a lot of other stuff that in real life would lead to staff being fired, or guests being thrown out or police being called. I would have preferred events that stick to realism.

- The option to create recipes and add them to the menu sounds great, but then you discover that the available food types are so limited that even some really simple, common, recipes are not possible. Also, the icons to help represent your recipe are also very limited with for example, roast fish as an icon, but no icon for any other type of roast (pork, chicken, etc).

- For such a simplistic game it also still contains a lot of bugs, you assign staff to individual appliances (stove, bench, oven, fryer, etc) but yet staff will regularly use appliances they aren't even assigned to, leading to a situation where you may have multiple chefs, but one stops working because an unassigned chef has taken over their appliance. This is just one example of bugs/flaws in how this game works.

I can only assume this game was originally a mobile/facebook style game, aimed at a casual audience, that has been adapted for PC. It needs a lot more content and needs to be made more realistic if it's ever going to be appealing to anyone other than casual gamers. Worst still, it will not be improved on, the developer already has a pinned note in the discussion stating the game is being abandoned due to lack of interest, so there will be no improvement on any of the simplistic features it currently has.

The controls are garbage. Although controls are split in to categories such as on foot, in vehicle, etc, you can only use a key binding once. So A cannot be assigned to an in vehicle control, plus a different function on foot. In GTA I have wasd on foot, and in vehicle a = accelerate, z = brake, left arrow = turn left, right arrow = turn right. I've tried to replicate this in Cyberpunk 2077 but it seems to be impossible. For this reason I won't recommend this game, and I'm not only uninstalling it, I'm going to permanently delete it from my steam library.

Yes, I'd highly recommend this game to anyone who enjoys stealth, and even those who don't have the patience needed to really master this game, you'll still find plenty to enjoy.

I would also highly recommend you buy the full Hitman 2016/2/3 - World of Assassination trilogy, plus all the DLC to ensure you get the full story, and additional campaigns.

Locations:
From the training missions, Paris, right through to the Carpathian Mountains in Romania, every location is extremely well done. The visuals are stunning, and the sound and music are also excellent and suit their locations/missions. There's a ton of replayability via the challenge system encouraging multiple play-throughs of every map, and on top of that you have additional campaigns, Elusive Targets & Elusive Target Arcade, Escalations, Sniper Assassin, Freelancer, and the ability to create your own custom missions/targets and download custom missions made by other fans.

There is also a lot happening on each map, for me these locations feel alive, with plenty of NPC's going about their own lives as you track down your targets. At least for me, I feel there isn't a bad map in the entire trilogy. Obviously, some I enjoyed more than others, but I still enjoyed each and every map and I enjoy going back and re-playing each of them again.

Graphics:
Firstly, I'd just state I'm not always that focused on graphics, I don't focus purely on FPS or other stats, and to me the visuals of this game were stunning. To get the best out of Hitman you'll need a beefy PC and GPU, but it's still great visually even on lower settings.

Sound & Music:
Again, sound is excellent, lots of sound FX, as I said there is plenty of life happening around you on each map with appropriate sounds as people go about their business. Music is excellent and changes based on the situation, from soft calm music to more frenetic music as you close in on targets and assassinate them.

Content/Value:
While the price for all the content for the trilogy is high, at least for me I feel it's worth the cost. As previously mentioned each map is extremely replayable due to the challenge system and I'd highly recommend you try completing each of the challenges to get fun/creative ways of dealing with targets and to experience everything this game has to offer.

Summary:
Hitman 3 and the World of Assassination is an excellent game and one I'd highly recommend to anyone. Like many games, it's had some hiccups along the way, but IOI has done an excellent job of supporting the trilogy over a very long period now, and even now is still releasing Elusive Targets for those that missed them the first time around. This series has easily been one of my top games since it started back in 2016, I've enjoyed every minute of playing it, looking forward to what comes next for Agent 47 and IOI.

An extremely dumbed down and limited version of Axis & Allies, try the older Hasbro title that was released for Win95/98 era, it's far superior to this rubbish.

Do not buy this game, it's a serious rip off, especially don't pay for the second DLC, it doesn't exist, and never will.

This game is a complete rip off, and the developer, publisher, and even steam should be ashamed of the way they are still selling this product with a 2nd DLC that the publisher has already stated will never be delivered as the game has been "archived". For those, like myself, that pre-order this game having already paid for that second DLC. which as I just said they have no plans to ever deliver. They took money from people and never delivered the product that was paid for.

The game itself isn't terrible, but yet at the same time isn't great either.

Positives:
- The visuals are nice.
- The sound is good.
- Combat is okay, fun at first.
- Skills/Upgrades - it has a reasonable list of skills you can learn as each member of the team levels up. I won't go into detail, but some are useful, others not so useful.

Negatives:
- Combat - as I said it's okay, but it quickly becomes repetitive - AI regularly makes very poor decisions during combat.
- - At the start of combat, they won't enter via the door you actually clicked on, they'll be randomly placed inside the building. Randomness in a game like this isn't necessarily a bad thing, but to me being essentially teleported to the opposite side of the building is a bit jarring. To me there are better ways to create randomess to this type of game. It also kills any real ability to try different strategies/tactics in combat, since you're just randomly placed, you can't choose how you want to approach combat.
- - As combat triggers, they'll scatter, but the places they choose to take cover in often make no sense as they provide cover in the wrong direction, and leave themselves completely exposed in the direction fire will actually be coming from.
- Businesses (legal/illegal) - too limited, not enough variety.
- The city/map felt like a bunch of disconnected towns rather than one large city.
- It HAD potential - however as noted above this game will never reach its true potential, it's been abandoned.
- Dialogue is terribly cheesy, and the same lines a repeated over and over again. Not sure if it was bad writing or bad acting, I suspect a combo of both. As an example, you can fully upgrade one of your own businesses, and still, when you walk in with your chosen boss they'll regularly say "What's this dump?".... it's one of your own businesses you idiot, or worse, it's your home/safe house you dumbo.
- What is there is good, but ultimately it lacks content and would need a few large DLC updates to be a worthwhile game.

Would I recommend this game to others... NO, NO WAY!

Paradox and Romero should be embarrassed to have released this game in the state that it was in. They should be ashamed of themselves for taking people's money and then running away without delivering what was promised, and yes, it was officially stated two DLC would be delivered. Avoid Romero games at all costs, a game about criminals, and in my opinion, made by a bunch of criminals. Will not be buying a game by Romero ever again.

Yes, I would absolutely recommend this game to anyone, whether you're familiar with the old Commandos games from Edios, just a strategy/stealth fan, or someone completely new, this game is excellent. This game is a standalone expansion to the original Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun, and the story is set up as a side story to the original, occurring in a period of time between missions from the original. Should be noted that there were no updates to the game controls, engine, or anything else, it's just an additional story.

As I said this game is very similar to the old Commandos Behind Enemy Lines, Beyond the Call of Duty, 2, and 3, and while it doesn't introduce any real groundbreaking features, it doesn't really need to. The first few missions/maps introduce you to the eventual team of 5 that you'll be using throughout the story, and that story is well done, again nothing groundbreaking, but keeps you interested till the end.

Once familiar with the characters it's basically up to you to pick your way through each map, you can choose to take every enemy on the map down, or sneak your way through, only taking out enemies when absolutely necessary, and I like that they give you this choice. Just like in Commandos, you can click on enemies to show their cone of vision, which consists of two parts:

- A brighter area, closest to the enemy, where you will be spotted regardless of your stance
- A darker area where you can remain unseen when crouched, but will be spotted if you stand up

Using these vision cones, rooftops, bushes, and buildings, you can sneak around the map unseen and strike at enemies you choose to kill. Each of your characters has skills that can be used to lure or distract enemies and get them into a position where you can strike. On top of this there's "Shadow Mode" which lets you queue up orders for each of your characters, and then execute them all simultaneously, or in a specific order, this system allows you to take down groups of enemies without raising any alarms. On easier difficulty levels "Shadow Mode" pauses time, letting you queue up your orders before executing them, on the hardest difficulty time and enemies continue to move, adding an extra challenge to this mode of play.

Alarms are triggered when you are spotted by an enemy, and this results in additional enemies coming out of guard house buildings, and even if you've managed to get out of the area these guards will investigate and then start a patrol on the map, making your task more difficult. However, the game is designed to encourage trial and error with a quick save/load option as you play through each mission. As long as you remember to keep saving regularly, and then make a mistake, you can easily reload and try again till you find the best strategy.

Enemies come in 3 types, I won't go into a huge amount of detail except to say each type has strengths and weaknesses you will need to learn and find a way to exploit. As you raise the difficulty level the type of enemies around the map will go up to the harder types, there will be additional enemies to be dealt with, and some that were stationary will now be patrolling or vice versa.

Visually the game is very pleasing to look at, with plenty of colour and life on the maps. There are a total of 6 maps/missions (the final one isn't really a mission, just some talk after the final mission is completed) taking you across a variety of landscapes and conditions (sea/beach, forest, town/city). In terms of music, I wouldn't say it was music I fell in love with, but there is nothing wrong with it, it does the job, and certainly doesn't detract from the experience in any way. Voice acting for each of the characters is very well done, each character has a Japanese accent that helps with immersion, and as they tell the story allows you to get to know each character and stay invested till the end.

There are also optional challenges players can complete. These consist of things like trying to complete a mission without using a specific character or character ability, completing the mission without using rooftops or bushes, or completing it within a time limit (there are a few others but I won't name them all). Again, I just stress these are optional, if you fail the challenge, eg the time limit, the mission is not over and there is no penalty of any sort.

The controls are easy to use, you can easily rotate the maps, zoom in and out, and I never experienced any major issues with the controls moving characters around or seeing.

I've heard a few complaints about the game not bringing enough new or groundbreaking features to the genre, but I think it's important to remember that Mimimi is a small studio, and there is only so much you can do before it's no longer a Commandos style experience and becomes a completely different genre of game.

As stated at the top, I would recommend it to anyone wanting a fun Commandos-style experience. I'm very happy Mimimi has helped revive the genre, and it's clear to me as a longtime gamer (since the late 70s) that they're a team with a genuine interest in this genre.

Shadow Tactics Blades of the Shogun has been one of my favourite games since it released, and I highly recommend this game to anyone that loves the real time tactics genre and specifically the Commandos style of games, or any lover of good strategy. If you’ve never played a game like this before it may take some getting used to, but if you keep pushing and learning you’ll be rewarded with a fantastic game.

The story is set in Feudal Japan and interesting to follow along as you play through each mission, and without giving away too much it does have a few interesting twists along the way.

Each mission map is well designed, with lots of colour and detail, beaches, lakes, bustling towns, mansions, castles, and more, all in traditional Japanese style. There are multiple paths you can take through each map, on the ground, using bushes and other objects for cover, using wagons and other vehicles to bypass sections of the map, secret passages, or across the rooftops. The difficulty gradually ramps up with each mission, there’s plenty of “accident” kill opportunities and other creative ways to achieve primary and any secondary objectives, all maps having additional badges/challenges providing some replay value. These challenges range from things such as only using certain characters to complete the mission, speedruns, not using any cover, and several other ways to push you to find another way through the mission.

Each of the 5 characters is well thought out, Hayato has a shuriken and is able to distract enemies by throwing stones, basically the all-rounder of the team. Mugen is the strong man able to take down multiple enemies in one attack, but also able to carry bodies and lure enemy units with his bottle of sake. Then there’s Yuki, able to lure enemy units with her trap and whistle. Aiko uses disguises to distract and lure enemy units. Lastly there’s Takuma who acts as the team sniper, able to target enemy units at long range.

The difficulty levels seem well done with beginner being the easiest, normal, and hardcore level being the hardest. Difficulty is ramped up by adding some additional enemies to the map, changing out simple guards for tougher NPC’s (Strawhats/Samurai), or NPC’s that can’t be distracted (Strawhats/Samurai).

Graphics and sound are excellent, they’ve really done a great job of creating a believable Japanese world that looks and feels like feudal Japan, lots of beautiful trees and flowers, streams and lakes, lush green fields, snow, the maps are stunning and very pleasing on the eye. When walking on snow you’ll leave footprints behind which can be used by enemies to track you down, or by you as a tool to lure enemy units in for you to kill. You’ll also get visual queues indicating how much noise your actions will make, allowing you to decide when to get noisy and when to keep it quiet.

Alarms system is also good, rather than the entire map going on alert if you get spotted, as it did in Commandos, in this game there are separate sectors/zones where an alarm is triggered, so only that part of the map goes on alert, with additional enemies being deployed.

Controls, I never had any issues with the controls in this game, and if you dislike the default key binds you can always change them to whatever you prefer. Sometimes there can be small issues where a view cone is not 100% accurate, but in my experience, this occurs in all games in this genre, but I would stress this is a very minor issue and 99% of the time the view cones work perfectly. The showdown mode is also excellent, allowing you to easily plan out actions for each of your team members so you can take down multiple enemy units in one go.

Bugs, well there really isn’t much to say here, there are a few minor issues I’ve noticed, but on the whole, Mimimi have put out some high-quality games with very few bugs, and Shadow Tactics is no exception.

I think for me one of the big reasons I’ve loved all the games from Mimimi in this genre is the fact that they focused on something other than WW2, and the vast majority of games in this genre do focus on WW2. This fact only makes it all the more sad that Mimimi have stopped making games, at least for now, and there are very few developers that strived for the level of quality that Mimimi did, a developer I will very much miss.

In summary, again, I would highly recommend this game to anyone. Great visuals, great sound, good controls, good story, a very enjoyable game.