Shogun Showdown (2024)

That's it. Got 35/36 achievements and I think I'm gonna stop at that.
All 35 achievements were about fun ways to play with extra challenges of certain playstyles and limitations.
The 36th one is just about 100% completion and that adds no value, no thanks.

Thank you Shogun Showdown, one of the most enjoyable turn based tactical games for me. It's been a fun experiece.

It's turn based game, but when you perfectly plan and execute a chain of: swap, mirror teleport, attack and shadow dash, resulting in 4 enemies killed in a single turn, two of which by friendly fire - it feels like you're the ultimate ninja.

Also, there are 5 difficulty levels, which gradually ramp up the challenge.
And after beating the game, difficulty 1 feels like a relaxing activity.

Just got the "ultimate obliteration" (no damage run) achievement!
And it feels like a well earned reward for staying patient and taking breaks when my brain gets tired and hasty. Because mistake in one turn often means getting hit on the next one.

I bought Shogun Showdown on a whim, at a time when I was stuck in a rut of unenthusiasm for games. The art looked cool, and the mechanics seemed like my style, and more than anything, the reviews were really positive. I opened the game to be greeted by pristine pixel graphics, an instantly tantalising soundtrack and an accessible, innovative gameplay system. Needless to say, the rut was over.

It became quickly apparent that Shogun Showdown had created a completely revolutionary combat system. One turn, in Shogun Showdown, is one single action. You take one, and the enemies take one. You can do one of four things on each turn, often by pressing a single key. It's elegant: both cerebral, and somehow still reminiscent of an honest to goodness samurai movie fight scene. Every surrounding feature of the game fed into the combat's brilliance - the interface, the art, and more than anything, the music - a treasure trove of tracks blending 8-bit tones with traditional Japanese instrumentation. Beyond the bare bones of the combat system, the initial difficulty curve felt perfect for me: I beat the game's first boss on my third run. I began to take the game seriously.

As I approached the journey of Shogun Showdown's progressively increasing difficulty levels, I felt spoilt by the level of player consideration built in to the game. The game has a built-in timer (as is increasingly common among roguelikes), and yet this timer pauses automatically in shops and between battles, giving you time to make thorough decisions. Saving and quitting mid battle holds your place, down to the move. Unable to quit and reload to rewrite your mistakes, you're forced to relinquish your perfectionism, and focus instead on the puzzle. As you progress, you're rewarded, both with enticing new characters and new moves, providing new ways to tackle the ever-increasing challenges.

And then, it stopped. The final character was unlocked. New tiles no longer appeared. The final two hardest difficulty levels remained uncompleted. The challenges had taken a sharp increase, but this wouldn't phase me. I grit my teeth and made it through Day Six, the second hardest difficulty.

By the Final Day, I was still determined. I pushed through and found my experience beginning to sour. The level of procedurally generated difficulty made it so that death was, literally, unavoidable on the majority of runs - I began to bemoan features of the game I had once loved. Yes, the key-press combat is simple, but wouldn't a trusty confirmation button stop me misclicking and ruining my one good run? It is nice that it saves your moves, but wouldn't it be better if I could reload the whole fight, given how heavily the odds are stacked against me? My runs began to feel like a race against an internal clock: I had to beat the game before I started to dislike it.

And then, I beat the Shogun on Day Seven.

Just barely, I managed it. The flash of the screen was promising. I waited for the credits.

The credits didn't come. Instead, another boss. A harder one. One that, given my unfamiliarity and nearly decimated health, I didn't have a chance in hell of beating. I ended up back at the interim screen, with no acknowledgement of the feat I had just accomplished. It was the beginning of the end for my affair with Shogun Showdown.

What continued to frustrate me was just how simply the game's core problems could be fixed. The final day should have been Day Five, just before the player runs out of new ways to solve their problems, with the final difficulty increases included as post-game challenges. Near-insurmountable difficulties are par for the course in roguelikes of a similar calibre, and I enjoy many of them thoroughly. Shogun Showdown, however, excels at preventing its players from escaping into the kind of tricks and exploits that make those difficulties beat-able. In the end, the game's gentle guiding hand felt more like a headlock.

Once, Shogun Showdown was a game that felt happy to have me. Now, it eyes the door and yawns exaggeratedly, suggesting that it might be time for me to leave. I sincerely feel there are some design issues which leave the game unsatisfying and difficult to finish. And yet maybe, after all, it's really just a skill issue.

I am burnt out (please envision a small bird, face down and wings out on the floor like SPLAT)

I want to finish this game so bad!! I want to tell the grouvee friends about it properly!!! I want to beat day 7!!! But god it is so hard and so unforgiving! The issue is that I have the skills, but all it takes is one split second lapse of judgement (or even a misclick, which my disability causes me to make a lot of) to render an hour-long run worthless 😭😭😭

Worse still, when I took a break from it before, I found it so much harder upon return. If I put it down I doubt I'll ever pick it up again and finish it. What say you, internet people? Push on or give up?

THIS GAME RULES!!!!!! dear god the music is fuckin awesome. I never keep the music on in games like this. Enough to get it in my head, and then off so I can listen to something else while I play. It may get turned off at some point, but right now I get hyped with every level I go into because I get to listen to music that just absolutely slaps. The gameplay is also so on point it's crazy. When you learn, it feels like a turn-based fight, but once you get quicker, the controls are so simple that it feels like you're using your reflexes. SO satisfying.

I was initially a little annoyed by how permanent everything is, but it's actually great for my frustration levels. I don't save scum to try to undo small mistakes, I just learn. I don't try to beat the game into submission, I just accept that I'm not playing well when I'm tired. A small detail: once you beat the game, the stats which show up include the time of each run, but that timer pauses whenever you are out of combat. Sexy.

ALSO. MY ARMS DON'T HURT. Game devs, you woo me.

Game #62/225 Shogun Showdown is another title in the increasingly popular roguelike deckbuilder genre -- it seems that over the last 5 years there have been countless attempts by indie developers to simultaneously ape and surpass Slay the Spire -- and it is addictive as expected, but also rather unique in its gameplay and fun. Having just played 10 hours of the solid Cobalt Core, I knew that I would inevitably compare the two as I played SS, but to be honest the latter is so clearly better (other than in the visuals/music department, where CC is a clear winner) that I sort of forgot about the former. The battles involves moving on a horizontal grid with a few attack options in the form of tiles. It uses turn-based gameplay to decide who is going to attack, but you always execute your actions first which is nice. The tiles you start with are complemented by a character-specific action that involves movement in some fashion; maybe switching positions with an adjacent opponent or grabbing an enemy and moving him closer to you. The brilliance of the gameplay is seen in the ability to upgrade your tiles, acquire new ones, grab skills that synergize with your run, and pull off combos during battles to destroy your opponents and quickly move through turns. The gameplay is so simple in a sense; it's rather intuitive and easy to get the hang of, yet you'll feel yourself steadily improving in how you strategize as you continue to play. Your health is quite finite and careless strategy will lead to a quick death, but I found it amazing how well the game's "day" system tracks with your personal improvement at playing. Day 1 -- essentially the easiest difficulty -- starts as a low-moderate challenge. But trying to beat day 2 or 3 takes quite a few hours of figuring out how to overcome some of the added difficulties. Throw in that there are 5 characters, with 3 sets of starting items each, and there is enough variety that spices up the already addictive gameplay to make SS extremely hard to put down. Not only that, but there are "challenges" for each character, for example beating a run with 70 combo kills or in under 20 minutes, that add to the replayability, and like most roguelikes, there are permanently unlockable items.

I feel like there should be more to comment on, but that's basically it. There's a number of fun, well-designed bosses, the enemy variety is not too extensive, but it's enough (especially with "champion" variants) to remain an exciting challenge, and as you get better, you'll honestly focus more on how fast you can win or challenge yourself in other ways. Shogun Showdown may be one of my favorite roguelikes, and almost certainly in the upper tiers of the deckbuilders with Slay the Spire, Monster Train, and Wildfrost.