Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew Reviews

Nice little pirate tactics game, the graphics are nice but not exceptional. The story ain't too deep or difficult, it is all about treasure (what did you expect in a pirate game). Never played any other mimimi game, so I cannot compare it with the other stealth tactics games. But overall I liked it, it was entertaining for 44 hours.

Good game. Plenty of play styles and re-playable, Just had my first crash after 90.1 hours of play time, not bad for a game from a disbanded developer, so no more updates. Buy it if you like puzzle games.

Another amazing game by Mimimi. It saddens me that this will be the last one, however, they have delivered something incredible. From the characters, to the visuals, to the quests, to the stealth aspect of the game, to voice acting, writing, everything is perfect. I wish good luck to all the devs and thank you for this game!

A fun and fitting goodbye from Mimimi. After Japan and the Wild West, we now get undead pirates, magic, and the evil Inquisition....what’s not to like? If you've played Shadow Tactics or Desperados III, you’ll feel right at home. If not: it’s a real-time stealth puzzle strategy game where you control up to 3 characters with unique abilities and try to complete missions without being seen. This time, you can choose which crewmates to revive and bring on missions, giving you more freedom. Though it also makes things a bit easier and more generalized, since every mission has to work with any team combination (with a few exceptions where 1 character is fixed). You revisit the same islands a few times, but different parts, so honestly, I could count how often I returned to the same area on the hand of an old cannoneer. That would change if I tried to 100% the game. The main story is apparently only about 40% of the content. I felt satisfied finishing it (I’m writing this review right after that point) and I don’t think I’ll go for 100%. Still, it’s a unique and polished farewell, maybe not as tight as Shadow Tactics (my favourite) or Desperado, but a solid entry in the genre and a good starting point for newcomers.

This game was a lot of fun. Loved each of the characters and their different abilities. You can get creative with how you deal with situations. I recommend this game.

Not nearly as good as the other games they've made. Dull story that's forced in your face, easy levels. Quite sad because I quite enjoyed the other games, especially Desperados 3.

[b]TLDR[/b] It's fun stealth/tactical games, but I feel it overstayed its welcome. Although I can easily recommend this game when it's on sale. [h2]Story[/h2] The overall story is just so-so. Sometimes it's entertaining, but it lacks decent build-up considering length of the story. Most of the casts personal story aren't exactly interesting or memorable either. Teresa's story is the only one that hooked me. The lore/world-building isn't exactly strong either, and I feel some themes were just randomly mashed together. Although I must admit the way they incorporated 'save scumming' mechanics with the story is rather cool. [h2]Gameplay[/h2] For reference, I played the entire campaign on normal difficulty. The gameplay is definitely fun. The developer clearly tried to balance each character, even by adding weird limitations (e.g., Pinkus doesn't know how to reload while possessing an enemy). But for better or worse, there are fair amounts of skills and skill combinations that 'broke' the game (e.g., Suliedy's bush makes stealth much easier). I mostly enjoyed the 'broken' stuff, although it may be a deal-breaker for some of you. I also agree with others that some maps are used too frequently. Day/night-time doesn't make much difference, although playing with different casts on the team and trying new combos somewhat helps. I also feel annoyed that the game never allows me to play more than 1 mission when visiting an island. [h2]Other[/h2] Both visual and music are fairly good. Nothing outstanding, but I have no complaint either. This game also runs on my Linux device quite well. The only issue I experienced was the game froze a few times after finishing a mission, where I had to force-quit it.

Had a perfectly good time with Shadow Gambit. Bloody shame that Mimimi is no more. Overall, though, I'd rate both Shadow Tactics and especially Desperados III higher. The story and the setting in Shadow Gambit are a bit of an acquired taste; liked them just fine, personally, and voice actors have done a fantastic job (Pinkus and Gaelle are easily my favourites, with Marley and Teresa both getting an honourable mention), but I can easily see how all this jazz can do precious little to endear for some. The gameplay is more of the same, which is exactly what I wanted; immediately felt right at home. I'm not convinced that having such a large cast of playable characters was a good idea, though, especially given how most missions let you choose any combination of characters available to you, which clearly must've affected level design. I'd definitely prefer a less sizeable set of characters to use with meatier ability sets. I've just finished the game, and maybe I'll keep going for a bit to tackle some challenges and whatnot. In any case, I suppose the experience was marred by this nagging feeling that Shadow Gambit could've been a better, tighter experience. But again, I liked Shadow Gambit more than enough (would've dropped it along the way otherwise), and I find it easy to recommend the game.

Love it, yes a little late to the party and this is experience from the demo/first part of the game. Great atmosphere, reminds me very much of the Pirates of the Caribbean, love the characters and the levels are well thought out. I hope the devs from Mimimi are still in development somewhere else in the field (and of course have disregarded all the uncalled for negativity that a handful of misogynistic and racist numpties dished out!). I would say a def buy!

Oh gosh, where to start? I've completed all three Mimimi games and have about 70 hours on each one. The TLDR, I don't recommend this over the other two. I really wanted to like this game going in. Shadow Tactics was amazing, Desperados III was an interesting improvement (With some character OP creep), and then this one... with some VERY OP characters, and way too damn many characters. With the DLC you have 11 characters, it's just too many it's stupid. Theme wise, ugh, I don't know how I feel. It is a total rip on Pirates of the Caribbean, zombie pirates, black pearls. It doesn't feel like it ever gets out from under the hollywood ripoff and becomes its own story, like yeah its not the same but there is this constant feeling of Pirates of the Caribbean undertones on everything that it's detracting from the overall experience of the story it wants you to buy into. Technically, this engine has all the improvements but still has bugs, the most annoying is how this game handles verticality and mouse clicks and rotation, it's hard to describe, but it's a real pain in the butt, and all three games with this engine have suffered this exact same issue. So yeah, technically it's the best engine of the three games apart from some odd quirks. Miss-clicks will abound the more above 'sea level' of the games map you are. Musically, it's great, some really cool tunes and great atmospheric sounds... until everything starts repeating too often. Every mouse click brings the active characters quips and they only have like three quips, and they just repeat them.. every.. freaking.. mouse.. click.. EVERY FREAKING MOUSE CLICK! {face melts}... The voice actors aaah... well... Some of the voice acting is fantastic (The Marley, Gaëlle, Teresa, Yuki, Zagan) and some are terrible (Affia, Quentin) the rest are middling at best that you don't notice them, but they get annoying fast (Looking at you Pinkus). Some characters are VERY OP in comparison to others (Suleidy, Yuki).. The biggest downside is every character has a very slow and shit basic attack, like it takes forever to execute or they throw on a flourish and your basic attack lasts for like 4+ seconds which is an eternity. Suleidy has a basic attack of like 2 seconds or something, so you can kill a character on the edge of another character’s vision cone and they will die before the cone reaches you and goes yellow all the way, that's really insane, and none of the other characters have a basic attack that fast, plus she can grow a bush to hide in immediately. She also has the 'come to me' and 'go away from me' powers giving you the best of everything and is really all you need all combined in one character. In previous games no one character had all those skills combined, which is all you need to complete things, hence using multiple characters. As for Yuki, her trap attack can be spammed on kill so fast it's like a machine gun that you can just drop 10+ enemies over and over and spam it from a bush. There is so much overlap, you have 10 characters (not counting the jester who can use all the other characters skills), and apart from having favourites, there is no reason to take any one character into a mission over another, like a mission with Toya, Teresa and Gaëlle vs Pinkus, Zagan and Quentin.. you will spend the same amount of time and achieve the same effect overall. All characters have a skill upgrade, and I used none of them the entire game (because I didnt see the stupid 1 pixel size arrow icon on the skill to know they didnt get used automatically! stupid design), apart from Teresa's who has a passive upgrade that when she fires her crossbow, any character can pick up her bolt (until you unlock her upgrade she is useless as a sniper as she herself has to go touch the crossbow bolt where the body dies, and she only has one shot to use!). So LOTS of characters and oh.. the stupid character crew tales.. In between missions you can do a crew tale. Each character has a 4 to 5-step 'story' they do, and it's a real mind-numbing boring 'press space to skip' thing that is optional and gets you nothing. Gaëlle making skeletons do a stand-up mic night. Pinkus looking for tobacco.. Toya and his lisping fish.. but they take forever to do! (ok yeah I did them all too). Which brings us to the captains mirror tales where the dead captain makes several characters do from 1 to 3 missions where they right a wrong of their past, again these feel like larger versions of the crew tale, and are still mind numbing (Like toya has to go to one map, collect some ingredients, then you load on another map and cook a meal.. and cook a meal.. and cook a meal.. omg save me if it was done on one map I could kind of handle it). About the only one I liked was Teresa's and Pinkus's mirror mission, they were interesting (sucked I did them back to back which is the same damn map). None of them are story related, they don't advance things. (I feel like they are trying too hard to world build and shove all this character content that has no meaning into things, like Gaëlle's poetry and pen pal letters). So let’s talk about the missions. Things initially start out very promising then go south really fast. The previous games (Shadow Tactics, Desperados III) had a new map for every mission, it was amazing, but here they have like 5 maps that you do new missions on up to six times on one of them. It gets boring really fast, I think is one of the games biggest problems and makes it feel that it overstays its welcome. I get that they put a LOT of effort in creating and designing the maps and want you to see it all, playing a map twice would be ok, but six times is so beyond fun it's just terrible. The game is basically split into two halves, the first half is you doing the basic world missions, then you do the character mirror missions, and if you have played the previous two games you knew exactly what the end puzzle was going to be [spoiler]basically doing more kills at once than you have characters for[/spoiler], and yes you probably guessed it. [spoiler]the final puzzle took me three retries, and about 10 minutes to complete it was a massive let down[/spoiler]. The DLC is very underwhelming and far far too short. Zagans island needed to be used better, it's amazing for what it is but massively underutilised. Mission enemies, there are a couple of different types, they are mostly the same as the previous games with some variants but nothing crazy. Every mission has badges, (different from steam achievements). There are a LOT per mission and by character. So many it's annoying, some are really hard to get, and others the game literally throws at you (there is a badge for starting a mission and one for completing it), there is a badge for kill all the developers (these are named NPC's in the missions), I'm missing two of the 50+ odd names. which ones? no idea the game doesnt keep that info for you. But yeah lots of useless in game badges (kill 50 people, hide 50 bodies etc). All this makes the game feel like a boring drag. It needed an Editor to tell the team to cut things down, Six characters max, don't reuse the same maps over and over and over and over again, stop with the stupid repeated character quips. Lose the useless stuff (crew tales) and design a better ending. I didnt really run into anything I consider a standout bug, the one noticeable thing was I took the two DLC characters into the final mission and then the game loads in with a 'fooled you (but not really coz nobody was fooled)' and loads into the real mission, it swapped my DLC characters out for the main team (I left behind, Pinkus and Gaëlle their skills were irrelevant to the end fight). I've played the other two mutliple times each, I don't think I'll bother to play Shadow Gambit ever again. [olist] [*]Shadow Tactics (still my favourite by theme) [*]Desperados III (the most cohesive and story driven) [*]Shadow Gambit (too damn long and repetitive) [/olist]