Shadow Tactics is an old-school real-time stealth tactics game in the tradition of Commandos, but set in Japan, and with a lot more personality.
For those of you who are too young to remember Commandos, it was an old PC series from the late ’90s. It was a real-time stealth tactics series of games that defined how this specific genre should work. In Commandos, you’d control a squad of elite commandos who would sneak behind enemy lines to complete objectives, overcome various challenges, and try not to get killed. This was achieved by escalating scenario complexity, requiring you to chain abilities together to achieve objectives while staying hidden, managing enemy line of sight, and avoiding enemy patrols. The end result was that each level felt like a puzzle that you could tackle in numerous ways.
Shadow Tactics carries on that design but has a much stronger narrative hook due to its setting.
Set in early Edo-period Japan, a new Shogun is trying to stabilize the country, and he’s dependent on a small team of specialists to help secure that stability by putting down rebellions, completing covert operations, and being all-around badasses that no one can know about.
The main game has 13 missions, and the expansion, Aiko’s Choice, has three. Each mission is extremely replayable, as the missions have a very toy-like puzzle-box quality to them, and you can approach each mission differently depending on how you decide you want to play them. That replayability, and the cast of likable characters, is the key to what makes Shadow Tactics work as well as it does.
The game is a real-time stealth tactics game, so what does that mean in practice? It means that moment to moment, you move your characters in real time, and your actions have immediate consequences. If you have a character standing in a path where a group of enemies regularly patrol, they will walk past you, see you, and kill you. Similar to the Metal Gear series, each enemy has a vision cone that you have to work around, and you can lure guards away from what they’re doing with various distraction methods and then knock them out, kill them, drop environmental hazards on their heads, etc., in order to keep things moving forward. Like Metal Gear or any other stealth game, you can’t leave bodies lying around. You can hide them in bushes, drop them down wells, or stash them anywhere you can keep them out of sight so other enemies can’t find them. If an enemy finds a body, they will immediately go on high alert and look for you.
Earlier I mentioned that you play a group of specialists, and what that means in practice is you are controlling multiple people with different abilities in real time to achieve your objectives. Each character is different and has different abilities, and utilizing those abilities is key to getting through each level.
For example, Hayato, the character you start with, is a ninja. He’s designed to be stealthy. He can throw rocks to distract guards so he can sneak up behind them and execute a silent attack. He can throw shuriken to kill enemies at range, and since he’s a ninja, he’s mobile. He can use grapple points, climb up various walls, and execute drop attacks on enemies.
Hayato plays completely differently than Mugen, the samurai. Mugen isn’t the guy you want to execute stealth kills with—he’s designed to mow down enemies and has a special attack that will kill anyone who steps into its circle. He can lure guards with a bottle of sake (who knew that everyone in this period of time would see alcohol on the ground and not question it?), and he also gets a pistol to take shots at people.
Other characters introduced over the course of the game include Yuki, another stealth character who won’t win any direct confrontation but has a toolkit designed to separate enemies and lure them into traps. She is very mobile, like Hayato, and can climb all over the place in order to facilitate her setups.
Aiko works differently than any other stealth character, as her toolkit is based around deception. She can disguise herself as a geisha or a priestess to move through places the rest of the team cannot (they are recognized immediately and attacked). She also has sneezing powder, which reduces an enemy’s field of vision. Some of the setups you can create with her for assassinations are absolutely bonkers.
Rounding out the crew is Takuma, the group’s sniper. He has a wooden leg, so he’s not sneaking up on anyone. You deploy him on the battlefield to help take out specific targets that the others can’t get to and to clear a path.
Each of these characters has some overlap in their abilities, but nothing overlaps or becomes so powerful that any character feels unnecessary. Each character augments another in specific ways, and those augmentations and overlaps serve the puzzle-box nature of each level, providing an extreme amount of flexibility and replayability. The end result makes this almost feel like G.I. Joe set in feudal Japan. And even though the game is 10 years old, it absolutely holds up.
The ability design of each character creates gameplay that is slow and deliberate. Unlike a game like Metal Gear (yes, I know I mentioned Metal Gear twice already, but that’s because most people seem to know about hiding bodies from that specific series), this is not an action-stealth game. You can absolutely get into moments where things go haywire and see how they play out, but the levels in this game are built in a meticulous manner, designed with specific friction points and challenges.
The expectation is that you will find a way around or through those constraints. One of the differences here is that you’ll be taking a lot of smaller actions that build into larger ones to help you get through each level. This can play out with something as simple as distracting a guard so he moves into the blind spot of another guard, then taking both out at the same time since you can have your characters execute specific actions in unison. When you pull off a complex maneuver like that, it feels awesome. It feels less like a stealth game and more like stealth chess, where a knight slashes through three pawns while your rook just stabbed an enemy knight and hid it in the bushes.
One thing to mention is that because of the way this game is designed, each level can go from long, to very long, to “holy shit, what time is it?” long. Part of this comes from the fact that every level has you in a bad situation that typically gets worse, and you’re always outnumbered—but never powerless. To help mitigate the feeling that you could ruin hours of play time by making the wrong decision, you can save and load anytime you want. This doesn’t make the game less difficult; instead, it encourages experimentation and lets you explore how deep the game really is. See that patrol over there? Try six different ways to take them out and see how each version plays out. If you don’t like it, reload. What’s interesting about playing this way is that each approach often creates a different chain of outcomes as you move further into the level. Every small action really does build into the others you make to eventually complete the mission.
And that’s really what this game is about. Shadow Tactics rewards experimentation and wants you to try things so you can see the results. That’s why it’s so well regarded, and even 10 years after its initial release, it still holds up.
In terms of presentation, the game still works. It’s not going to blow your mind, but it looks good and focuses on visual clarity so you can understand what you can and cannot interact with, track enemy vision ranges, and read the level effectively. The environments look good, but they’re in service of the gameplay.
Okay, Leigh, thanks for telling us about the game. Why should I buy this on Switch 2?
Two reasons. One is good, and the other is questionable.
First, portability. The ability to play docked or portable, combined with suspend mode, makes this the perfect game to play in chunks. It makes the game’s long levels feel much more manageable and digestible for people who are pressed for time.
The game runs at 4K and 30 fps docked and at 1080p and 30 fps in handheld, so performance is solid regardless of how you play.
Second, the game takes advantage of the Switch 2’s mouse controls. On paper, this seems like a great addition and one that brings the game closer to its original PC feel. The problem is execution. The controls work well—but where do you actually use a mouse? Typically at a desk or on a laptop. Not on a coffee table or your lap in front of a TV. It’s not a great experience to hunch over just to use mouse controls in docked mode. In handheld mode, they’re also less practical than just using the Joy-Cons.
This implementation feels similar to early DS touch controls—something added more because it could be than because it should be. Mouse controls are faster and more precise, but they require a very specific setup that compromises comfort.
So what would make you buy the Switch 2 version of Shadow Tactics over another version? That depends.
If you have a PC and don’t care about portability, there’s no real reason to buy it on Switch 2. The PC version performs better and offers the definitive control scheme.
If you don’t want to play on PC but have other consoles and don’t care about portability, PlayStation 5 or Xbox versions will perform better.
If you care about portability and performance, the Steam Deck is arguably the best option. It offers flexible controls (including trackpads as a mouse), better performance than Switch, and often a lower price. You can also connect a mouse and keyboard if you want.
None of this is to downplay the effort of porting Shadow Tactics to Switch 2. The game is great, and the port is solid—but it doesn’t really stand out compared to other versions beyond the mouse control option.
Bottom line: Shadow Tactics is a fantastic old-school stealth tactics game that rewards thoughtful play and is incredibly replayable. If you don’t own it elsewhere and want a portable version, it’s worth picking up on the Switch 2. If portability doesn’t matter to you, it’s still absolutely worth playing—you might just want to choose a different platform.
Set in early Edo-period Japan, a new Shogun is trying to stabilize the country, and he’s dependent on a small team of specialists to help secure that stability by putting down rebellions, completing covert operations, and being all-around badasses that no one can know about. This is Shadow Tactics.
Shadow Tactics is an old-school real-time stealth tactics game in the tradition of Commandos, but set in Japan, and with a lot more personality.
For those of you who are too young to remember Commandos, it was an old PC series from the late ’90s. It was a real-time stealth tactics series of games that defined how this specific genre should work. In Commandos, you’d control a squad of elite commandos who would sneak behind enemy lines to complete objectives, overcome various challenges, and try not to get killed. This was achieved by escalating scenario complexity, requiring you to chain abilities together to achieve objectives while staying hidden, managing enemy line of sight, and avoiding enemy patrols. The end result was that each level felt like a puzzle that you could tackle in numerous ways.
Shadow Tactics carries on that design but has a much stronger narrative hook due to its setting.
Set in early Edo-period Japan, a new Shogun is trying to stabilize the country, and he’s dependent on a small team of specialists to help secure that stability by putting down rebellions, completing covert operations, and being all-around badasses that no one can know about.
The main game has 13 missions, and the expansion, Aiko’s Choice, has three. Each mission is extremely replayable, as the missions have a very toy-like puzzle-box quality to them, and you can approach each mission differently depending on how you decide you want to play them. That replayability, and the cast of likable characters, is the key to what makes Shadow Tactics work as well as it does.
The game is a real-time stealth tactics game, so what does that mean in practice? It means that moment to moment, you move your characters in real time, and your actions have immediate consequences. If you have a character standing in a path where a group of enemies regularly patrol, they will walk past you, see you, and kill you. Similar to the Metal Gear series, each enemy has a vision cone that you have to work around, and you can lure guards away from what they’re doing with various distraction methods and then knock them out, kill them, drop environmental hazards on their heads, etc., in order to keep things moving forward. Like Metal Gear or any other stealth game, you can’t leave bodies lying around. You can hide them in bushes, drop them down wells, or stash them anywhere you can keep them out of sight so other enemies can’t find them. If an enemy finds a body, they will immediately go on high alert and look for you.
Earlier I mentioned that you play a group of specialists, and what that means in practice is you are controlling multiple people with different abilities in real time to achieve your objectives. Each character is different and has different abilities, and utilizing those abilities is key to getting through each level.
For example, Hayato, the character you start with, is a ninja. He’s designed to be stealthy. He can throw rocks to distract guards so he can sneak up behind them and execute a silent attack. He can throw shuriken to kill enemies at range, and since he’s a ninja, he’s mobile. He can use grapple points, climb up various walls, and execute drop attacks on enemies.
Hayato plays completely differently than Mugen, the samurai. Mugen isn’t the guy you want to execute stealth kills with—he’s designed to mow down enemies and has a special attack that will kill anyone who steps into its circle. He can lure guards with a bottle of sake (who knew that everyone in this period of time would see alcohol on the ground and not question it?), and he also gets a pistol to take shots at people.
Other characters introduced over the course of the game include Yuki, another stealth character who won’t win any direct confrontation but has a toolkit designed to separate enemies and lure them into traps. She is very mobile, like Hayato, and can climb all over the place in order to facilitate her setups.
Aiko works differently than any other stealth character, as her toolkit is based around deception. She can disguise herself as a geisha or a priestess to move through places the rest of the team cannot (they are recognized immediately and attacked). She also has sneezing powder, which reduces an enemy’s field of vision. Some of the setups you can create with her for assassinations are absolutely bonkers.
Rounding out the crew is Takuma, the group’s sniper. He has a wooden leg, so he’s not sneaking up on anyone. You deploy him on the battlefield to help take out specific targets that the others can’t get to and to clear a path.
Each of these characters has some overlap in their abilities, but nothing overlaps or becomes so powerful that any character feels unnecessary. Each character augments another in specific ways, and those augmentations and overlaps serve the puzzle-box nature of each level, providing an extreme amount of flexibility and replayability. The end result makes this almost feel like G.I. Joe set in feudal Japan. And even though the game is 10 years old, it absolutely holds up.
The ability design of each character creates gameplay that is slow and deliberate. Unlike a game like Metal Gear (yes, I know I mentioned Metal Gear twice already, but that’s because most people seem to know about hiding bodies from that specific series), this is not an action-stealth game. You can absolutely get into moments where things go haywire and see how they play out, but the levels in this game are built in a meticulous manner, designed with specific friction points and challenges.
The expectation is that you will find a way around or through those constraints. One of the differences here is that you’ll be taking a lot of smaller actions that build into larger ones to help you get through each level. This can play out with something as simple as distracting a guard so he moves into the blind spot of another guard, then taking both out at the same time since you can have your characters execute specific actions in unison. When you pull off a complex maneuver like that, it feels awesome. It feels less like a stealth game and more like stealth chess, where a knight slashes through three pawns while your rook just stabbed an enemy knight and hid it in the bushes.
One thing to mention is that because of the way this game is designed, each level can go from long, to very long, to “holy shit, what time is it?” long. Part of this comes from the fact that every level has you in a bad situation that typically gets worse, and you’re always outnumbered—but never powerless. To help mitigate the feeling that you could ruin hours of play time by making the wrong decision, you can save and load anytime you want. This doesn’t make the game less difficult; instead, it encourages experimentation and lets you explore how deep the game really is. See that patrol over there? Try six different ways to take them out and see how each version plays out. If you don’t like it, reload. What’s interesting about playing this way is that each approach often creates a different chain of outcomes as you move further into the level. Every small action really does build into the others you make to eventually complete the mission.
And that’s really what this game is about. Shadow Tactics rewards experimentation and wants you to try things so you can see the results. That’s why it’s so well regarded, and even 10 years after its initial release, it still holds up.
In terms of presentation, the game still works. It’s not going to blow your mind, but it looks good and focuses on visual clarity so you can understand what you can and cannot interact with, track enemy vision ranges, and read the level effectively. The environments look good, but they’re in service of the gameplay.
Okay, Leigh, thanks for telling us about the game. Why should I buy this on Switch 2?
Two reasons. One is good, and the other is questionable.
First, portability. The ability to play docked or portable, combined with suspend mode, makes this the perfect game to play in chunks. It makes the game’s long levels feel much more manageable and digestible for people who are pressed for time.
The game runs at 4K and 30 fps docked and at 1080p and 30 fps in handheld, so performance is solid regardless of how you play.
Second, the game takes advantage of the Switch 2’s mouse controls. On paper, this seems like a great addition and one that brings the game closer to its original PC feel. The problem is execution. The controls work well—but where do you actually use a mouse? Typically at a desk or on a laptop. Not on a coffee table or your lap in front of a TV. It’s not a great experience to hunch over just to use mouse controls in docked mode. In handheld mode, they’re also less practical than just using the Joy-Cons.
This implementation feels similar to early DS touch controls—something added more because it could be than because it should be. Mouse controls are faster and more precise, but they require a very specific setup that compromises comfort.
So what would make you buy the Switch 2 version of Shadow Tactics over another version? That depends.
If you have a PC and don’t care about portability, there’s no real reason to buy it on Switch 2. The PC version performs better and offers the definitive control scheme.
If you don’t want to play on PC but have other consoles and don’t care about portability, PlayStation 5 or Xbox versions will perform better.
If you care about portability and performance, the Steam Deck is arguably the best option. It offers flexible controls (including trackpads as a mouse), better performance than Switch, and often a lower price. You can also connect a mouse and keyboard if you want.
None of this is to downplay the effort of porting Shadow Tactics to Switch 2. The game is great, and the port is solid—but it doesn’t really stand out compared to other versions beyond the mouse control option.
Bottom line: Shadow Tactics is a fantastic old-school stealth tactics game that rewards thoughtful play and is incredibly replayable. If you don’t own it elsewhere and want a portable version, it’s worth picking up on the Switch 2. If portability doesn’t matter to you, it’s still absolutely worth playing—you might just want to choose a different platform.
by Leigh Lamb
