7 – Commandos 2: Men of Courage
I cannot pour enough love and praise on the Commandos franchise. In fact, I would even go as far as to say that if it wasn’t for it, this website wouldn’t even exist. My closest friend and I spent days, nay, months playing all of the Commandos games, well into the night, and those are some of my favorite gaming memories. While I love the first title, I have to shine the spotlight on Commandos 2: Men of Courage, the second real-time tactics and action-strategy game set during World War II, where you command an elite, specialized squad behind enemy lines to complete demanding, objective-based missions.
If you’re unfamiliar with the series, it’s extremely simple: it continues the core gameplay of being a challenging “action-puzzle” that requires meticulous planning, absolute stealth, and precise timing as you exploit enemy sight-lines and the unique skills of each commando. This entire series wrote the blueprint for all other stealth tactics games to come in the future, and it’s still one of the most beloved out there, and one of the best World War 2 strategy games ever made.
6 – Desperados III
Developed by the now, unfortunately, defunct Mimimi Games studio, Desperados III is a story-driven, hardcore tactical stealth game set in the Wild West, serving as a prequel to the classic series. Desperados III’s gameplay is unapologetically lifted straight from Mimimi’s first title, Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun, where players command a small squad of unique characters through large, intricately designed maps to complete objectives while being vastly outnumbered by enemies. I played the game two years ago and loved the vast, complex stealth puzzle maps that demand a lot of observation, planning, and then nerve-wracking execution. The five available characters range from a classical gunslinger to a voodoo witch, each with their specialized set of skills and weapons. I loved my time with it, and despite the amount of complexity the game and its maps have, I still remember them in a lot of detail—a testament to its everlasting design quality.
5 – Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew
It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that Mimimi Games titles will be making a strong showing on this list. The first time I played Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew, a fantasy real-time tactics (RTT) stealth game that followed the launch of Desperados III, I wasn’t very impressed by it. If Desperados III already had big maps, they felt designed for a more puzzle-like approach for a specific character in that specific mission, which I don’t normally enjoy (unless it’s in these kinds of games). Shadow Gambit opened the maps even more and removed the puzzle-like approach for a more “design your own strategy” kind of gameplay. At first, most of the maps just felt like they sacrificed a lot of the challenge to allow for every character on the roster to be useful, but later missions proved to be hard enough to tackle. While the game might take a while to get there, it does, and when it does, it’s the best game Mimimi ever designed.
Players take control of a cursed pirate crew with supernatural abilities aboard a sentient ghost ship, the Red Marley, as you fight back against the zealous forces of the Inquisition who hunt all Cursed individuals. As for the gameplay, it’s the same as Shadow Tactics and Desperados III, but now you can decide which of the crew members you want to take into a given mission, giving the player more strategic freedom and a lot more replayability to the game.
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