It's been a long time. I hope the 64-bit version for Mac can be updated soon.

Game crashes, won't load. The first time I played it crashed but I thought nothing of it. Restarted and seemed to play fine for 30 minutes. Since then I've been unable to play the game. It either won't open at all, crashes within 5 seconds during the developer logos, or crashes as I'm trying to load/continue. I have a top tier laptop, very capable at fixing and modding games. Nothing I can do will fix this and I'm just going to give up before trying to fix it absorbs my evenings. For the 30 minutes I played it seemed kinda fun, but can't comment further.

I love ninja and stealth games, so picking this up was a no brainer for me. What I did not expect was actually repeating missions over and over to get the achievements. They dont unlock anything in-game, its just the satisfaction to be able to have done the thing, and honestly its there as a challenge and a bit of an excuse to continue engaging with such a fun and engaging game. The game wants you to take things at your own pace, explore, and experiment, to discover how to go about its diorama-like enviroments and accomplish its different mission scenarios. Cant help but praise this work of love, and the studio behing this game will be sorely missed.

May they be happy and find success in their future endeavors. And I can only hope someday another studio will continue producing stealth games of this kind, at this level of quality and polish.

This is commandos but with ninjas. Awesome story, Awesome gameplay. Each mission can take hours to play and more to master

Beautiful tactical.

Pros :

- kill stuff (well, mostly guards) in a beautiful Edo-era Japan ;
- various array of tactics to take down your enemies, with challenging situations (you probably won't be bored with that one);
- each character has a great personality, which adds even more flavor to a nice storyline ;
- to be a ninja or a kunoichi really feels good in this game.

Cons :

- you will scratch your head more than once with this one. Prepare to die a lot, and retry a lot to fully handle what you have to do ;
- if you want to unlock everything, arm yourself with patience, for you will retry stuff over and over and over....

Time to scarper... this samurai is getting suspicious of me.

good

excelente

A very solid tactical stealth game. The first in a looong time. It has elements reminiscent of Commandos and Lost Vikings, with different highly specialized characters that you need to use to maximum effectiveness to succeed well. Its also the first game in a long time (since Fallout 2, to my recollection) that completely drops the "critical path" that devs are almost universally addicted to. You have your tools, and objectives in each mission, and the character dialogue gives you some pointers for most-obvious-path-to-success. However, those pointed out by the characters are NOT the only options. You can get very creative and often "skip" entire sections of a mission through unique application of skills and surroundings.

The biggest con I have for the game is the AI could be better. The pathing for your characters is not very well done. You have to micro-manage even short jaunts to avoid a character stepping in a puddle by 1 pixel, dashing across a sandbar right in front of a guard instead of swimming around, or bumping into someone. I haven't tried the higher difficulties yet, but the enemy AI could be more dynamic. There are many levels where you can lead lemming-guards repeatedly using the same distraction tactic, never questioning why a rock keeps falling behind them over and over, why that cute little tanuki keeps leading friends away who never come back, or why someone keeps smacking them in the face with bags of dust. Enemies who do notice a missing companion (because of repeated scripted conversations) will briefly search, then I guess just assume that their friend deserted spontaneously and will get caught and punished later. It would be far more interesting if too many absences caused the remaining guards to adjust their guard strategy to maintain coverage of key areas. Of course, this would require more AI development than most devs are willing to invest in a game. I suppose it'd just be nice to see.

At times, this game feels like untangling a yarn that has been tied in too many knots in way too difficult places. But it is rewarding to get things done the way you planned, finally. Some maps are frustratingly hard, but doable. A faster player than me would probably spend a lot less time hitting reload.

The story is okay, the characters are interestingly different, but this is first and foremost a puzzle game where blood flies and dozens of people disappear in bushes.