Shogun Showdown Review

Some roguelikes are about breaking through the skin of your teeth. Shogun Showdown is about striving for perfection. Defeating each room filled with hostile ashigaru warriors is a challenge in itself, but doing so with style is the bigger task.

Simply defeating the demonic Shogun and his army of warriors isn’t enough—it has to be done with elegance. A true warrior fights his way into the castle without being struck, never moving unless absolutely necessary, taking down multiple enemies with each swift attack. And ideally, he does it in 30 minutes or less.

You start each round with two tiles—these are your weapon attacks, each specific in its exploit. As you defeat enemies, you earn recent tiles and can upgrade the ones you have. It has a deckbuilder feel, even if I have trouble calling a handful of tiles a deck.

Battles are 2D and turn-based. Almost every action requires a turn—jumping a square left or right, rotating a character, or lining up tiles—and once you do that, all of your enemies get to make their next move.

Success comes from thinking a few steps ahead. You always know what your enemies will do next—in fact, since they follow predictable patterns, you’ll know their next move once you learn their behavior. You can line up up to three of your tiles before you release them, attacking one after another in a single turn. The trick is to survive—dancing back and forth between attacks—until you can line up the perfect combo that takes down two, three, even four enemies at once, clearing the floor for the next wave.

When you’re firing on all cylinders, you feel like you’re the director of the coolest samurai movie you’ve ever seen. Each tile is specific in its purpose—it always deals the same damage, hits in the same position relative to your character, and has the same effects—but the impressive variety of them, combined with each playable character’s special ability and the upgrades you can earn between fights, means that every run generates its own wild combos.

Before you know it, you’re slamming an enemy into another with your ability, spearing them both, and sliding backwards into a third to hit them in the back. Or you’re summoning a wall of thorns, thrusting it forward into someone’s face with a ki wave, then finishing them off with a poison arrow. Or you’re switching places with an enemy who’s about to swing to hit one of their allies, judo-slinging them over your head into someone else, dropping a bear trap at your feet, then pulling them back into it with a grappling hook.

You can just get by—playing conservatively, throwing out uncomplicated attacks one after another, taking some damage but healing yourself enough to survive—but the game subtly chastises you. Combo kills (multiple kills in a single turn) can trigger a variety of powerful effects, and in many cases are necessary to avoid taking damage—for example, when an enemy is waiting behind his friend, ready to attack as soon as his line of fire is cleared. Your stats for the run, including total combos, hits taken, and even the number of turns used, are constantly tracked on screen, and doing well in each gate unlocks certain items between runs. Even the victory screen for each level subtly grades you. If you win without taking any hits, you “destroy” the stage, while if you take one or two hits, you merely “clear” it—and pray you never experience the embarrassment of being told you simply “survived.”

It is a gentle encouragement that motivates you to play better and, most importantly, cooler. As you engage previously dormant neurons in your brain, your strategies become increasingly proficient, and the right combination, enhanced with elemental upgrades, cooldown reduction, damage bonuses, artifacts, and more, can start to feel unstoppable. The sleek interface—so streamlined that you can play through the entire game using just two mouse buttons and a scroll wheel—and the sprint timer encourage you to sprint faster the more arrogant you become. That is, until hubris leads you to fall and you accidentally bump your head into the sword you clearly saw you were about to swing. Well—dust yourself off and get ready for another run.

It’s an accessible strategy, but one with a ton of depth to delve into. Defeating Shogun for the first time is just the beginning, as you work your way through increasingly challenging difficulty levels, attempting to earn a full set of stamps (rewards for good performance in the game) for each character, completing challenges, and unlocking increasingly strange and nuanced attack tiles. After 35 hours, spread across the game’s journey through Early Access and beyond, I still feel like there’s still a lot more to see—and a lot more to learn.

Don’t let Shogun Showdown’s uncomplicated, charming appearance fool you – this is a game that aims to sharpen your mind into a deadly weapon. Even in the golden age of the genre, it stands out as one of the most addictive roguelikes available today