Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew Review – A Pirate’s Life for Me

With Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun and Desperados 3 under its belt, Mimimi Games has firmly established itself as a name that demands your attention in the real-time tactics and stealth genres. As such, coming into Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew, I had pretty high expectations. I adored both of Mimimi’s previous real-time tactics games, and the prospect of a game built on those foundations against the background of a pirate setting was an intriguing one, to say the very least. And happily enough, Shadow Gambit lived up to my expectations in all the ways I had expected and hoped it would.

In keeping with Mimimi’s track record, Shadow Gambit sees the developer tackling another completely different setting and using it to great effect. Like the feudal Japan setting of Shadow Tactics and the Wild West setting of Desperados 3, Shadow Gambit’s fantasy pirate world serves as a solid backdrop for the experience, and is consistently used to great effect. Combining tried-and-true pirate tropes with a dash of the supernatural – involving everything from spirits and sentient ships to eldritch horrors and more – the setting carries a very unique flavour that helps it instantly stand out, while all of those elements also bleed into the gameplay in some interesting ways.

"Shadow Gambit’s fantasy pirate world serves as a solid backdrop for the experience, and is consistently used to great effect. Combining tried-and-true pirate tropes with a dash of the supernatural – involving everything from spirits and sentient ships to eldritch horrors and more – the setting carries a very unique flavour that helps it instantly stand out, while all of those elements also bleed into the gameplay in some interesting ways."

The story told in the game itself isn’t particularly captivating – it does its job well enough in keeping you at least somewhat engage, even if it never truly enraptures you – and the cast of characters, though colourful and filled with personality, doesn’t ever touch the heights of the ensemble that starred in, say, Desperados 3, but even so, thanks to its excellently-realized setting and thoroughly built up world, Shadow Gambit is able to make its stamp even with its narrative elements.

Unsurprisingly, however, it’s the gameplay that truly shines here. Once again, Mimimi Games has crafted a real-time tactical stealth experience that manages to strike the perfect balance between being densely packed with interlocking stealth mechanics, while being incredibly easy to understand and hop straight into. On a fundamental level, Shadow Gambit does an excellent job, right from the get go, of communicating some of its core mechanics, from vision cones to situations where noise can attract attention, from how light and darkness affect enemies’ visibility to how you can use obstructions in their line of sight to your advantage. Visually, all of this is presented in incredibly clean and instantly readable fashion, so that all the important information you might need while you’re stealthing about can instantly be pulled up, without things ever getting too cluttered or becoming too overwhelming.

What helps those fundamental mechanics truly shine is how well-designed every map is. Throughout the story, Shadow Gambit takes you to a variety of locations, from a dense forest ruled over by an ancient, eldritch tree to an island that’s been taken over by the Inquisition and turned into a horrifying prison camp, and not is there plenty of visual variety to be found across all of these different maps, they also present unique challenges in how they’re designed. Some areas might have plenty of man-made structures that you can use for cover, others might be dominated by water bodies, and others still could be designed around different levels of elevation.

"Throughout the story, Shadow Gambit takes you to a variety of locations, from a dense forest ruled over by an ancient, eldritch tree to an island that’s been taken over by the Inquisition and turned into a horrifying prison camp, and not is there plenty of visual variety to be found across all of these different maps, they also present unique challenges in how they’re designed."

Thanks to the variety in the design of the locations you find yourself in, you can never get too comfortable with your surroundings, and routinely have to keep devising new tactics and strategies to counter unfamiliar challenges. Different enemy types also come with unique attributes, which brings further variation to the proceedings. Acolytes, for instance, are your low-level grunts and are pretty easy to deal with or distract, but other, more powerful enemy types are much more reluctant to leave their posts or patrols, while some can even require unique strategies to be taken out.

It also helps that Shadow Gambit encourages you to be creative in the solutions you come up with. Like Mimimi’s past games, it creates vast stealth sandboxes, fills them with challenges and obstacles, and litters potential solutions everywhere, letting you choose how to proceed. Which hiding places you want to use, if you want to take a particularly stealthy approach at all, what routes you want to take to get to your destination- there’s no shortage of variables in any given situation you might find yourself in, and the freedom with which you can approach almost all of them never ceases to impress.

Add to that the fact that the game turns save scumming – which was very much crucial to both Shadow Tactics and Desperados 3 – into an actual named feature, and you get a game where trial and error, and by extension, experimentation, end up serving as vital pillars of the experience. With the single press of a button, you can record “Memories”, which you can then turn time back to any time you want, allowing you to undo failures with great ease in order to try and further tweak the execution of your strategy, or to come up with an entirely new solution. And when you do finally manage to get past tough challenges through careful planning and execution, with each character playing their part to perfection- that never stops being incredibly gratifying.

"Shadow Gambit encourages you to be creative in the solutions you come up with. Like Mimimi’s past games, it creates vast stealth sandboxes, fills them with challenges and obstacles, and litters potential solutions everywhere, letting you choose how to proceed."

Speaking of the characters- without a shadow of doubt though, the standout strength of Shadow Gambit’s real-time tactics stealth is its cast of characters, all of whom bring so much more to the table in terms of mechanics than they do in terms of the story. Shadow Gambit lets you slowly expand your crew of pirates with colourful personalities as you progress further in the game, and each new addition brings something completely new to the table. Afia, the central protagonist, can phase in and out of existence and blink to an enemy’s location to catch them by surprise, while Pinkus can transport his spirit into someone else’s body to take control of their mind. Suleidy has the power to control plans and spores and can create bushes to hide in, while Teresa can use her crossbow to take out targets from great distances. Gaelle can stuff people into her canon and shoot them at other people, while Toya can throw small paper charms that he can then teleport himself to.

Each character comes with a unique and inventive set of abilities, and regardless of what the makeup of your party looks like, they can all be incredibly useful, and can be used in increasingly creative ways. Jumping into Shadow Mode to pause the action and using their abilities in conjunction to get past a particularly tricky challenge never stops being fun, and regardless of what your party’s makeup look like – you can only have a maximum of three characters in any given quest – you never really feel like you’re stuck with someone less interesting than the others, because they’re all so much fun to use. Shadow Gambit also smartly encourages you to keep changing up your party from mission to mission rather than sticking with the same crew, because if a character sits out a mission, on their next mission, they’ll increase your vigor rewards, so having different parties in each mission lets you make faster progress towards unlocking upgrades for character abilities.

Between missions, Shadow Gambit takes you to the Red Marley, a sentient ship that also serves as the central hub location, where you can engage in side activities (like short, character-specific missions), speak with the members of your crew, or unlock upgrades. This is one area where the game falters more than it succeeds. The character-specific missions, known as Crew Tales, are dull and uninteresting with almost no exceptions, while ability upgrades can take too long to unlock, and don’t all feel equally useful. Thankfully, Shadow Gambit seems fully aware that the downtime between missions is not where its strengths lie, and doesn’t waste too much time in getting you right back into the thick of things.

"Between missions, Shadow Gambit takes you to the Red Marley, a sentient ship that also serves as the central hub location, where you can engage in side activities (like short, character-specific missions), speak with the members of your crew, or unlock upgrades."

Going into Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew, I had a pretty good idea of what to expect, and though the game doesn’t surprise or upend expectations in any real way, it does live up to them with great aplomb. Not only is it mechanically tight, dense, and wonderfully nuanced, it’s also an incredibly rewarding tactics experience that encourages you to tackle its stealth sandboxes however you see fit. From the way its maps are designed to how wonderfully varied its characters are in gameplay to how the game’s clearly defined ruleset always seems to work exactly the way it should, Shadow Gambit has all the elements in place to make for an excellent, extremely replayable, and consistently enjoyable stealth experience.

This game was reviewed on the Xbox Series X.