Shogun Showdown review

After half an hour with Shogun Showdown, a roguelike, deck building strategy gem, I started to feel like an idiot. Much how I felt when playing the ludicrously simple, but utterly fantastic pared-down RPG Dungeon Encounters. Why couldn’t I have come up with a concept like this? This too, is so simple, yet has a gameplay loop that becomes addictive and compulsive from the tutorial onwards, and has that crucial “just one more go” feel that any game of this ilk needs to succeed.

There is no story, no cutscenes to set things up: just this well executed segment that introduces the rules of the game effectively, and then you are straight into the world map and on your first run. The art style features charming 8-bit style renditions of feudal Japan, with no small amount of rather cute pixelated gore and humour that for some odd reason reminded me of Archer McClean’s legendary IK+.

You play the role of a dinky samurai warrior on a 2D plane consisting of spaces that you can hop between. You are given a set of attack/action tiles, that reminded me of mahjong pieces, that have a variety of different outcomes. Initially you are given a close-range sword melee weapon and a bow and arrow that can hit foes across the tiles. Later on, you get different tiles that allow you to perform special actions.

Each new one you discover gives a real thrill. You can swap the order that the tiles you hold will be executed when you carry out a turn. The other basic actions are to turn your character facing the opposite direction or stay put and wait. Every action costs you a turn, but the enemies you encounter each get their chance to react after each one. The weapons and specials also have a cooldown period, meaning you can be left defenceless and unable to attack at times. Therefore, you need to have a chess-like sense of planning to win the day and defeat all of the enemies without succumbing to their retaliation and losing all of your hit points.

Thankfully you encounter shops on each run, where you are able to pick up health-restoring consumables that can be used in combat, and you can also power your arsenal up and buff your tiles to do things like shortening the important cooldown time. A clever skills system also lets you enhance your loadout and make your deck of tiles even more effective and powerful. The game goes one better than this with a nice clutch of overall progression systems. One of these helps to make future runs more palatable, a bit like the Mirror of Night in Hades.

As you move through the game and slay the bosses on each map, you are rewarded with skull icons that can be used to open up new skills and tile types, or enhancing the stock available in the shops with new and improved items. Progression also unlocks cool new characters that all play very differently with different starting decks that change the way you approach each new run. Each time you are successful on a playthrough the game upgrades your character, which down the line improves your starting abilities and ostensibly makes it easier to win on subsequent plays. Or does it?

There are also different Days to unlock and play – basically altered versions of the maps with ever-more tricky shifts in the difficulty, but better rewards if you do crack them. Clearly developer Roboatino has taken the feedback received along the way during the early access period and used it to tweak Shogun Showdown into the taut, super-addictive entity it has become. This is a cracking game that lures you in nicely with its simplicity but eventually becomes a rather complex beast with a lot of very well thought-out moving parts. It deserves to be a huge success.