Patience is a Virtue

Have you ever wanted to see the future? What would you do if you could? Prevent a tragedy? Direct yourself towards success and away from failure? Do you think you would make the right choices even with this power? Shogun Showdown asks these questions of you and gives you all the tools you need to succeed. Whether you do or not will depend on your skill.

Shogun Showdown is developed by Roboatino and published by Goblinz Publishing and Gamera Games. I played the Switch version of the game but it is available on multiple platforms. 

You stalk the lands looking for a path to the Shogun. Why is unclear, but your purpose is obvious. Every journey takes you a step closer to this goal. A series of islands between you and the Shogun’s palace. Each step means a fight with the Shogun’s goons and the bosses that command them.

Each fight finds you standing in the middle of a 2D arena, the same number of spaces ahead and behind. You only have a moment to take in the lovely pixel art backgrounds before the first wave of enemies spawns in. You’ll fight through multiple waves each fight. 

Fights are turn based and you can always see what is coming. Enemies announce their moves and attacks with complete clarity. Attacks appear above the heads of the combatants with damage telegraphed. You can even look at additional details about each attack; how far away will it strike, how will it move the opponent etc. Will this information help you? Depends how good you are.

You start out with just 2 attacks. Each one does damage and has a cooldown. Every time you move, turn around, choose an attack, or execute your attack the cooldown ticks away. Not only for you, but for all your enemies as well. They don’t advertise the precise cooldown like you do, but you get to know the rhythm of the different enemies.  

Your attacks appear above your head, just as for your enemies. You can store up to 3 and when you execute them they activate from bottom to top. As the game progresses you build up a repertoire of powers, increasing your ability to manipulate the situation to your advantage. 

Complimenting your attacks, each character you can play as has its own way of moving around the tight arenas you fight in. The starting character, The Wanderer, can swap places with an enemy in the space directly ahead. These move powers have a cooldown just like your attacks. I won’t spoil the others that you can unlock. 

You have these tools to combine them. You swap places with an enemy about to attack, putting you in the middle of a group and making them miss. You can now attack, hitting ahead and behind with one attack and firing an arrow ahead. Two enemies are dead for the price of an action. 

Getting these combo moves is the core of what makes Shogun Showdown so satisfying. Combining your limited tools into a crescendo of violence never ceases to entertain. Enemies can be turned against each other, attacks reflected at the aggressor, fighters turned into fortifications while you plan your next move.

In between fights you build up your toolbox. In the respites you might get a new attack, or be able to upgrade an existing one. These upgrades could be as simple as extra damage or as tricky as increasing the cooldown of an attack to make it freeze enemies on contact. 

At the end of each island is a shop and another opportunity to upgrade. Here you can gain skills, passive upgrades that can change how your special move works or a variety of other aspects of how your fights will play out. The different shops give access to different skills, and you know the upgrade you are going to get going in. Again you are given foresight, and asked to choose your path. 

Of course no roguelike would be complete without a set of unlockables and Shogun Showdown is no different. Money from fights is spent at the shops to augment your run, but encounters with bosses give you skulls. These can be spent to get new attacks and skills that will pop up during your runs. Now you find yourself able to curse enemies so they take double damage, fire shurikens, have swords that build damage over time and all sorts of other fun toys. 

Once you have completed a run the game opens up a bit. More paths to the Shogun become apparent. New islands emerge from the mists. New difficulty levels are opened up. There are at least 7 of these best I can tell and a series of goals you can obtain with each character called Stamps. With a huge toolbox to unlock, lots of difficulty levels, achievements, and stamps, there is a lot of variety to keep your story of violence going for a long while. 

The aspect that has impressed me most about Shogun Showdown is how flexible the systems it gives you are. It is effectively a turn based tactical game akin to X-Com. You plan your attacks as I’ve described and they fire from bottom to top. However, you can rearrange the order of these at any time, without triggering a cooldown tick. You can even remove attacks from the queue at no cooldown cost. This feels incredibly flexible, allowing adaptation within the tools you have chosen for a given moment. It gives you more options and makes you feel incredibly clever when you rearrange a stack of actions to pull off an amazing combo kill. 

It has also surprised me how much patience pays off. One of the options you can choose instead of moving, attacking, or choosing an attack, is to simply wait. There is a literal button for it. A lot of the time you can get some attacks setup, but maybe you aren’t in quite the right position to execute as efficiently as you might. When you wait, cooldowns tick so enemies move and attack. This means they can converge on you which is sometimes exactly what you want. Using wait to time an audacious combo is a truly satisfying moment in the game. It makes you feel like a patient warrior, choosing their moment to explode in violence to make the best use of their situation. 

This is what Shogun Showdown excels at: making you feel clever, and powerful. It is a playground of tools and objectives you are given to play with. In the hands of another developer it might have come across as po-faced and serious. Instead you have a feeling of fun and experimentation. Of course the flipside of the game making you feel clever is that it can also leave you feeling like an idiot. All your mistakes come from past you. You never have anyone but yourself to blame. 

Shogun Showdown is a fantastic rogue-like. It has short runs, compelling gameplay, and a toolbox that is an absolute delight to dig around in. It can be a little hands off at times, leaving you to discover its systems on your own without a lot of explanation. That really is my only criticism. If Balatro hadn’t come out this year, I predict this would have easily been my favourite computer game this year. I foresee that you will be playing it soon. 

I was sent a copy of Shogun Showdown for Switch to review. My opinions are my own.

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