8 reviews liked by Mafuba3


Unbelievable how it's still unsurpassed to this day, it seems like every dev that has had the budget to imitate it hasn't been able to get it. Once in a century kinda stuff.

This game is so fucking funny, I can't.....
It's literally unplayable seizure fest where everything went wrong, I really want to know how did this game even release in general, it looks and plays like it was made in like 3 days. Comedy gold. I would like to give it 1.5 stars, but I just can't. Truly one of the games ever made

They should get to jail for making this shit

The story is an utter failure. Making characters act utterly stupid for the sake of the plot is never a good thing.

The gameplay is a lot of fun however. The stages look great and are very fun to explore. Bosses are amazing as well, and Viola's gameplay is pretty different and cool.

It could have been a lot better and enjoyable overall, if the story wasn't this bad.

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.

Un véritable jeu d'auteur créer par des gens qui aimait ce qu'ils faisaient. Mais qui n'avaient pas l'ambition de leurs intentions. J'en dirai pas plus. C'est pas un jeu que je referai
Mais il garde une certaine place dans mon kokoro malgré tout. Un jeu qui boîte mais qui n'arrête pas de montrer tout son affection et son amour pour son joueur.

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