Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew – Complete Edition

Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew is dead-on stealth tactics-filled with character and vigor – a peak for the genre.

Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew is a bountiful blend of stealth, strategy, and swashbuckling.

Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew is a cerebral but hugely characterful stealth tactics game filled with creativity and depth. And fun pirate stuff.

On par with its (excellent) predecessors, Shadow Gambit trades some focused design for deeply compelling piratical freedom.

Being a real-time stealth strategy game, I know the crewmates I choose can make or break a mission.

A crowning achievement of open world stealth puzzling, Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew is fiendishly good fun. Easily Mimimi's best stealth strategy game yet.

The coolest mechanic is the ability to pause the game and give each crew member instructions that they'll all perform in tandem with a tap of the triangle button. Planning a co-ordinated attack and then watching it unfold like clockwork is a pleasure that never gets old, and if you mess the whole thing up you can always just rewind time and tinker with your strategy until you get it right. These moments are Shadow Gambit at its best, and the game in a nutshell; it leaves you feeling like a tactical genius, even if it took you seven tries to get there.

Amped-up level design and non-linearity in how to approach missions elevate this strategic title in ways not seen in its forebearers.

I really like this niche that Mimimi has taken on in their games, and they seem to do it better with each go. Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew takes the character-driven stealth tactics I loved in Desperados and applies a ghost pirate theme to it in ways that are nearly always fun to play and beautiful to look at. It’s tough as nails and I wish I could experiment more before big choices, but I also think the concept allowed Mimimi to do some silly and spectacular things with its gameplay. Shadow Gambit sets a new standard for this studio, and I’ll be playing it until we get to see how they top themselves next.

Undead Pirates XXX is an excellent game; the only downside is the reuse of maps. That downside is a little self-inflicted because if you're like me, you want to kill the named guards (named after the developers) and do whatever else gets you a badge (additional side-quest things), so you do it all. Still, this is an outstanding real-time tactics game and one I would recommend to anybody and everybody. Fans of the genre, and those new, you're in for a treat.