DLCShadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun - Official SoundtrackLoading store offers
Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun
Players who prefer planning alone to rushing into fights get a strong tactical hook from the five specialists and their distinct skills. ≈ $2.44 at 
Kinguin is the concrete cost; whether it suits you depends on your appetite for patient observation and careful execution.
The game is single-player and offers three difficulty levels. That makes the purchase most relevant if you want challenging missions with several possible approaches. At $3.99 on Steam, weigh the price against the time you want to set aside for a tactical single-player campaign.
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Price History
Past 36 months · Updated dailyHistorical Low~ $1.732026-07Current Low Across Stores~ $3.19Kinguinvs. Historical Low+84%
Prices cover Steam and 39 authorized stores; only legitimate offers are counted. The chart shows weekly market-wide lows and Steam's official price across the past 36 months.
01About Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun
Sneak through Edo-period Japan and guide five specialists through dangerous missions where observation and planning matter. Each character brings distinct skills, from silent approaches and diversions to traps and ranged attacks. Choose a route through guarded castles, monasteries and forest camps, then adapt your tactics to each assignment. Steam player reviews: 96%% positive from 30,887 reviews. The Steam PC version includes single-player and full controller support. Interface and subtitles are available in 13 languages; full audio is available in English and German. Released December 6, 2016.
Credits
Developer
Mimimi Games
Publisher
Daedalic Entertainment
Lowest recorded in 36 months
$1.732026-07-30 · KinguinBase game · same records as the chart above; USD history, not a regional Steam low.Language support
| Language | Interface | Subtitles | Audio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Simplified Chinese | Yes | Yes | — |
| Traditional Chinese | Yes | Yes | — |
| English | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Show 10 more languages
| Language | Interface | Subtitles | Audio |
|---|---|---|---|
| French | Yes | Yes | — |
| German | Yes | Yes | — |
| Spanish | Yes | Yes | — |
| Japanese | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Polish | Yes | Yes | — |
| Russian | Yes | Yes | — |
| Korean | Yes | Yes | — |
| Portuguese-Brazil | Yes | Yes | — |
| Italian | Yes | Yes | — |
| Turkish | Yes | Yes | — |
Steam PC edition data · 2026-10-19
02Before you buy
Play and control
The Steam PC version supports single-player and full controller use.
Language support
Interface and subtitles are available in 13 languages. Full audio is available in English and German.
03Frequently asked questions
What does the gameplay involve?
You direct five specialists with distinct skills, including a ninja, samurai, geisha and marksman.
Where is the game set?
Missions take place in castles, mountain monasteries and forest camps in Edo-period Japan.
Are there difficulty options?
You can choose among three difficulty levels.
8.0
Overall Score
Graphics8
Audio7
Gameplay8.5
Story7.5
Content8
“The kind of satisfaction that comes from beating it after dying thirty times”
Our Verdict
Popular Steam reviews
Native-language selection · 10 reviewsSelected helpful reviews in this language show both recommendations and criticisms. This selection does not represent the overall positive rating; opinions reflect the version reviewed.
RecommendedSteam player
Before you bomb the forums with your complaints about the base price at launch please read this. It's not just the game you are paying for. You are paying for a time machine that will take you to an era of game development in which the released games were bug-free at launch, in which there were free demos to try out and in which tactical real time strategy was a popular genre. The pricing scheme was also different back then. Nowadays you figure out what the market is ready to pay either through pre-order or crowd funding. Then you make the game with the funds you received and release it once the money are spent. The result is a game in which the devs made cuts and compromises on some crucial aspects of the game such as graphics and artwork (just decrease the texture resolution and call it retro), level design (use algorithms to automatically generate level and call it procedural), or game play design (just make it overall hard and call it rogue or just don't introduce any game play and call it sandbox), proper testing (release it with bugs and expect the mods to fix these, call it AAA) or without sufficient content (make and release the content once the sales from the launched product hit in, call it DLC). Mimimi, the developer of Shadow Tactics did something different. They developed and released a finished product. They then calculated their development costs, made their sales projections and based on these they calculated the price of single copy of the game, such that the projected sales cover their costs and perhaps create some profit. If the base launch price is too high for you, wait for a sale or wait a couple of months until the price drops. In the meantime you can play the demo or (re)play its genre ancestors Commandos or Desperados. If you like the genre, consider buying this game at the full price - make it a success and show all game devs that we want more of these "time machines".Show moreShow less
10.5 hours at review1,008 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
Blades of the Shogun has received a lot of critical acclaim; and by and large it deserves it. However there are a pair of fundamental flaws that take a truly great game and turn it into a frustrating slog. The positive reviews have already focussed on what's good. The graphics, the atmosphere, and the music are all very good. The idea behind the gameplay is excellent and everything is well put together. I really wanted to like Blades of the Shogun. But eventually I found myself playing for completion rather than out of enjoyment. Blades of the Shogun is a puzzle game marketted as a tactical stealth based game; which is not in and of itself a problem except in execution. A tactical game should allow preparation before missions; should allow inventory management; and should allow a choice of team. A puzzle game gives a set - and limited - number of items and characters up front and asks that the missions be completed using them. AND THIS IS STILL NOT THE PROBLEM, I enjoy the idea of working with a limited loadout to solve each stage. I enjoy the planning and stealth aspect so, please, bear with me. I'm working up to where Blades of the Shogun goes so horribly wrong. Blades *really* should have been a turned based game. Or at least it should have allowed time to be paused whilst thinking. It has one of the clumsiest, clunkiest interfaces I've played with. Timing is incredibly important, as is being able to select a character and execute an involved command set. What actually happens, when executing a plan, is that half way through the enemy that absolutely needed to die is slightly obscured by an invisible collision polygon for a wall two feet to the left. And Instead of throwing a shuriken the character will stop and blithely tell you he doesn't see a way to climb it. Not being able to precisely execute commands is a huge problem. Shadow mode exists but can't be used for anything complex, it's just there to allow two or three kill commands to be simultaneously executed. It can't be used to tell a character to, for example: go there, wait for another character, then have both kill an enemy and run into the shadows. Shadow mode is tragically very limited. It is towards the later stages is that things get truly frustrating. Huge maps with walls and cliffs everywhere cause the camera to bounce all over the place and make picking enemies or the ground even more difficult. The camera can't be pointed straight down and must be twitched left and right to try and see. Couple this with characters who get hooked on each other, rocks and sometimes the enemy and they're going to be dying a lot. The path finding is bizarre too. The nice straight, quiet line from here to there can become an epic journey as a character decides they don't want to go where you want them to. Group selecting characters is risky in anything but the simplest maneuvers. As mentioned they hook on each other, spaz out, do twitchy circular dances and generally fail to do what they've been told if they are too close together. Which they will be, if group selected, because they clip right into each other when they move to the same spot. So the player characters often die unintentionally. A single dead character fails the mission. And this brings me, finally, to the most fundamental flaw that Blades of the Shogun has. Load times. For a game where loading is ubiquitous there seems to have been little effort put into optimising it. I have - quite literally - spent more of my play time watching the loading screen than actually playing the game. And this is why I've given it a negative review. For a game in which even tiny failures means death, failures that are often game flaws rather than player mistakes, to not have instantaneous load times is a slap in the face. Again it's the huge, intricate later stages that are the problem. Trying and reloading repeatedly whilst re-executing the same convoluted plan just sucks the fun right out of everything. It turns Blades of the Shogun into a boring slog of quick-loading. Every time an enemy starts shouting for guards when they should have been dead. Every time a character twitches into a view cone that they shouldn't have. Every time someone dies unexpectedly the stage must be reloaded. It's horrible and frustrating and it's the first time in years that I've actually hated a game. And it's unnecessary. Had the gameplay been pausable or turn based then twitching the camera to correctly select something would not have been a problem. Had there been a better mechanism for setting up and executing plans then there would not have been a problem. Even if neither of those could be implemented then quick loading and saving would have fixed the problem. But none of that was done, and that leaves us with the game we have. In summary: Blades of the Shogun is a puzzle game rather than a tactical game. It has a poorly implemented interface, hard to focus camera and repeated, pointless long load times. (Also Yuki has killed almost as many people as Chairman Mao but still sobs and cries, through each assassination, that she must be brave and not stupid; her voice actor makes me want to claw my ears off.) If you're not looking to play through the whole game then buy Blades of the Shogun but realise that the late game is a frustrating let-down.Show moreShow less
37.8 hours at review289 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
I am 68 years old...and I love this game. It is a real-time isometric strategy game that allows multiple ways to solve the puzzles to reach the end goal. Been looking for a game like this for a long time. The graphics are superb. An elegantly designed environment. A joy to just wander around in and explore. I hope they add modules to keep this genre going.Show moreShow less
32.4 hours at review576 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
Shadow Tactics is the prime example of why the steam review system sucks. I am torn between recommending/not recommending it. First I'd like to say that the game isn't "bad". Its not unplayable, its not broken or damaged goods. Its just so uneven that i cant possibly recommend it in good conscience even if I'd like to. Shadow Tactics isnt a bad game, but its just not what is written on the tin. It has nothing to do with tactics. The game is designed in such a way that the maps are segmented into puzzles with very specific solutions, so the word "tactic" doesnt come close to describing the gameplay. The gameplay revolves around a lot of trial and error, until you find the correct sollution to the puzzle. At no point does the game let you play with a tactic, it restricts your choices to the point where there is one solution to a problem, perhaps one and a half (nonlethal). Additionally playing this game is a chore and an exercise in frustration since a detection is a usually a game over. Once someone starts shooting, better hit that quick reload because it will spawn a platoon of guards that either hunt you down or replace all the guards you bypassed. Great fun. Let me contrast this with a good stealth game like the first Splinter Cell, a game in which the first mission segment (courtyard) can be completed in more than 5 different ways. Shadow Tactics lets you complete a segment in one specific way. Theres apparently a lot of people that like puzzles, thats fine, its not a bad puzzle game if you are into that kind of thing, but its not a good tactics or stealth game. Therefore i can not recommend it.Show moreShow less
2.6 hours at review151 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
Shadow Tactics harkens back to the glorious days of realtime tactical strategy games like Commandos. Instead of gathering supplies to build forces, the genre had you control a small set of heroes. As you use a combination of stealth, clever timing and frequent use fo F5/F8 to make your way across the map filled with enemies to complete various objectivies. Being outnumbered by a 100 to 1 at times, players had to use the map, the heroes and create a synergy amoung them to even the odds. The game takes place during the Feudal times in Japan. You control a group of heroes with different motives, come together for a common goal. The plot does an okay job to keep things going forward with a predictable twist in the end. The game introduces you to the basic controls and key abilities of the heroes with time. However, that is not enough for the players to complete the missions. Once the players understand the abilities, the map and start to combine them in clever ways, this is when the game really opens up. The game has pretty straight forward abilities, however as you play on you will learn clever ways to make use of those abilities for some really fantastic combos. There is also a tactical mode called Shadowmode which let you queue up 1 command per hero at a time and execute it instantly with a press of a button - this can open up to a lot of tactical opportunities when you have a very slim opening to do a number of things. You cannot queue up more than one action at a time which might be sad news for some. According to the developer the reason behind this is so the players play the game more in real-time as opposed to simply queue up every few steps along the way. Also bear in mind that you will be saving and reloading A LOT. This infact encouraged by the developers and part of the game to the point you see a handy timer which shows how long it has been since you last saved. So don't be be afraid to constantly F5 and F8. There is no clear way of using the abilities, you can use it as well as manipulate the game world the way you see fit. This sense of self-discovery is one of the reasons I enjoyed playing this game and reminded me a lot of the childhood days of me playing through Commandos for the first time. I had a number of frustrating moments with the game however. It is not always very clear when enemies can see you behind an object. Sometimes you feel like you are hidden behind a prop, only to be spotted instantly. The game has also pathfinding problems: I died a number of times trying to navigate my character to a certain point closeby, however the character ends up taking a really terrible way to get there by going through a different, lengthier path altogether. This can be very frustrating when you have a very small window to do a number of things, you do everything right but die because the pathfinding decides to break momentarily. Overall I enjoyed this game, reminded me how much I missed this genre. The voice acting is pretty good to for the main characters, although I find some npcs sound too british for my taste. It is not perfect as mentioned, but it is more towards fun than frustration. I really hope more developers start to make games like this. 7 /10 - GOOD!Show moreShow less
27.8 hours at review432 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
So... Shadow Tactics is a good game, well-put-together, as long as you know what to expect. Don't expect a squad-based tactics game, and don't expect a stealth game, either. Expect a puzzle game, played out with multiple pieces, with stealth mechanics as a veneer to cover the puzzles. Also, expect a game designed to take advantage of quicksave/quickload. This is a game where you often need to make several things happen at once in a sequence of perfect timing, but there's no way to pause the game to issue commands or plan out your moves. You are expected to have to retry the same puzzle several times until you can get the timing just right. Unfortunately, getting to that point involves quite a bit of waiting, and that waiting drags on even longer if you're not making liberal use of the quicksave button. This is a game where you might spend several minutes getting from point A to point B, just to spend another ten minutes trying to get the timing perfect, and now you've managed to complete one small part of the larger puzzle. Most of these levels take over an hour to complete, despite the fact that you could run across them inside of 30 seconds. I really wanted to like this, but it takes all of the negatives of stealth games (lots of waiting, high consequences for failure, often hidden enemies), multiplies them by adding in the difficulties of planning and execution in real-time and with multiple characters, and doesn't give you the control that usually is a necessity in either the action or squad-based tactics games. As a result, the game often feels frustrating to me and I feel like it's wasting my time.Show moreShow less
8.1 hours at review115 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
Boss: Do you remember the old game in ww2 with small group of soldiers the tactical one? Worker: commandos? Boss: yes, I want to make something like it but better Worker: how? Boss: ninjas, everything is better with ninjas Worker: ok Boss: and samurai Worker: oh yeah, anything else? Boss: and explosions Worker: sure thing Boss: and rotating 3d camera that looks like 2d Worker: ok? Boss: and put there at least one concubine Worker: you mean geisha? Boss: yes and some teen like ninja girl Worker: boss, do you think this is a good idea? Boss: and an old asian one legged pirate sniper Worker: boss? Boss: last thing, it has to have atleast 85 on metacritics and deadline is Xmass 2016 Worker:...Show moreShow less
20.5 hours at review428 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
I didn't love it. It's not for people like me, but in all fairness had I taken the time to read the description instead of buying based of the title, I would have known that. I was hoping to grind up stats and leave a trail of bloody victims in my wake, as though this were silent storm set in ancient Japan. Instead I got a stealth game with shades of Dawn of War II. Leaving a bloody trail results in waves of guards spawning and putting a quick and bloodly end to my mission. Even wading into battle with the enemies usually results in a grisly end and a reload. That being said, I can see why it currently has a 98% positive rating. It's a landmark for the genre. If somebody gave me the design document and said, "we're absolutely set on creating the best stealth game possible, how can we make this better" I probably couldn't do more than a snide "change the genre". If you like stealth based RTS this is the game you have been waiting for. It has an engaging cast of characters with interesting mechanics and what seems to be a well written story. Care has been paid to detail and new methods are constantly being presented, but the design still allows for multiple approaches to acheiving the missions. It's a testimate to the immaculate execution that I played it for 5 full missions before quitting, because, did I mention, I hate the genre? Still if, like me, you have certian expectations for games with "tactics" in the title, be aware that this is something totally different then the typical tactics game. I can't say that the name isn't justified given the nature of the game, but I can say that it doesn't scratch the itch I bought it for, or for that matter, any other itch, and for that reason, I'm putting it back in the box indefinatly. Edit: Hey guys, I get it, I'm the guy outside the Norman Rockwell exhibit telling people it's full of cans. Half of you guys loved it and are on your way out. I'm not here for you. 40% of you are like, "No ♥♥♥♥ it's Norman Rockwell" I didn't come for you either. Some of you are indifferent about cans and just want to spend the day at the muesum. Go right ahead. However, once in a while somebody will look at me and say "♥♥♥♥, I was about to spend my afternoon looking at cans?!" I'm here for you.Show moreShow less
9.6 hours at review80 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
If a soldier finds a body, they aren't just *more cautious for a few minutes before relaxing*, they sound the alarm. If a soldier finds footprints they don't recognize in the snow, they make a beeline straight for the cover the footprints lead to. If a soldier regularly sees another soldier, then suddenly finds post empty, they actually look around in nearby bushes. If a soldier hears a sound meant to attract him, but it's up on a ledge, he's not going to climb up there. This is a stealth game that takes the player seriously.Show moreShow less
5.8 hours at review350 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
I really, really, really, really, REALLY wanted to like this game. I was a huge fan of Commandos back in the day and granted it's been more than a decade since I played, but I don't remember Commandos being so tedious, which Shadow Tactics is. Tedious is really the word to use to describe this game. It isn't fun; playing this game feels like work. To be quite frank, it doesn't even feel like a "stealth" game. Sure, the game severely penalizes you if any bodies are found or you are seen, but that alone doesn't make a stealth game. A good stealth game has a puzzle element to it, and this game doens't have it. It's all about quick reactions using a poor control scheme requiring you to click with pixel-level accuracy. That sounds like a game of skill, but it really isn't. It's because of poor guard placement with at times all-seeing vision, and at times, the vision of a blind man. The result is the that F5 (Quick Save) and F8 (Quick Load) are your best friends. Successfully move 5 feet, hit F5. Waiting for 5 minutes for the concurrence of all the guards being in the perfect position to be able to kill and hide a single guard, hit F5. A game that requires me to save every 5 seconds and load as often as that is not fun. From what I've read online, this seems to be par for the course. Mind you, I don't mind tricky sections of a level. That level of stress and trial-and-error makes beating the level an achievement. But when the entire level is just a slog, well, I call that work, not constructive gaming tension. I would ask for a refund, but I've played this game for 11 hours by now. At this point, I'm really hoping that I'm missing some critical game mechanic or have a revelation that will make this the most awesome game ever. I'm surely hoping so because I was a HUGE fan of Commandos and I really want this "Shadow Tactics" series to join my list of favorite gaming series. P.S. I am no stranger to being patient to achieve your objectives. That being said, the game designers needed to realize that this is also a game. In the real world, you might need to wait 20 minutes an hour just to make it 5 meters across some guard's view. But this isn't the real world, and I don't relish sitting there staring at my screen for 20 minutes just waiting for a 2 second window in which I need to implement 6 different actions timed and aimed perfectly in a specific sequence. That is not fun and I have better things to do than practice the same 2 second window of actions over and over because the designers don't have a sense of constructive gaming tension.Show moreShow less
10.2 hours at review66 people found this helpful
Source: original Steam user reviews. Helpful votes are an archived snapshot, not live data. Last collected: 08/15/2026.