Sumerian Six Review

Real-time tactics titles are in a rough spot nowadays. In the realm of niche genres, this one manages to out-niche them all – being the awkward kid eating alone at lunch in the yard of Niche School. It takes a certain type of person to dig into the micro-manager niche of this niche, someone who doesn’t immediately crave giant RTS armies when right-clicking on the tiny on-screen dude – but also someone who doesn’t simply crave to control a single avatar and blast through the game action-adventure style. No, it takes a real sicko.

Curiously, I came to realise that I was indeed one of those sickos – playing things like Mimimi Games’ Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun had me craving the squad-based murder experience, so I was tickled to see that Sumerian Six was openly cribbing from that very same book with a magical Nazi killing adventure. And when I say cribbing, I mean they were unabashedly ticking all the most familiar boxes. This isn’t a bad thing, I’d almost argue that Mimimi Games has nailed the formula – so seeing Sumerian Six’s developer Artificer running through the playbook is a welcome one.

We now cross to Buck Steelgirder with the play-by-play breakdown

In Sumerian Six, the Nazis are using a mysterious magical fuel to develop super soldiers. You have firsthand experience with this weird purple goo – being that your squad were the ones to discover it and decide the stuff was too dangerous to continue being researched. Only one of your squad defects and shacks up with Hitler to bankroll further study, prompting the remnants of the squad to start recruiting and working towards taking care of your ex-associate and his various projects. As far as narratives go, it’s a fun one – mostly remixing a lot of familiar tropes from other forms of Nazi-adjacent media, but injecting some fun Sumerian folklore into the mix with a pretty killer tale of Gilgamesh as a defender of humanity. The third act of the game takes a pretty wicked swerve into some wild territory, but given the methodical nature of the regular gameplay I was very much on board with just getting weird with it.

I initially thought the setting would be a fairly safe one, given that the game immediately established a classic “But what if the Nazi war effort was researching supernatural science” shtick – but I was rapidly proven wrong when levels would range from a quaint German hamlet to sunburnt Sumerian ruins and then a sprawling underground research facility. The gigantic maps for each mission are worthy of awe, with how immense and densely packed with detail and baddied they are. Mission briefings are fantastic to watch, and do an amazing job of helping you pick your playstyle. Artificer’s level designers get to really flex here, because the briefing will legit zoom out to show you the entire map that you are working through – with on-screen scribbles showing key locations and paths, like breaking down a play in American Football. You then enter the environment and get to work, with the freedom to do so however you please.

If you have never played a real-time tactical title, just think of it as playing a MoBA only you are controlling multiple characters. You’ll navigate the world, methodically working through the enemies and their patrol paths with the limited toolset offered by whatever homies are on the mission with you at the time.  A game of this nature lives and dies on whether the toolbox provided is fun, and the peeps of the Enigma Squad are thankfully packing some super creative and clever stuff to work with. The classic twist of the Nazi’s utilising some kind of bullshit science means you too get to enjoy some of your very own bullshit science, with cloaking devices, chain lightning generators, remote bombs and more. This is then elevated further when you also get to play with some proper whacky toys, such as a Russian dude who can turn into a BEAR PERSON thanks to exposure to the aforementioned mysterious magical goo.

To quote Play School: “There is a bear in there”

Gameplay then becomes a case of observation and action. Your squad feels like a series of keys, and the world and the enemies within it pose locks that you must assess and unlock to progress. Enemy variety means different plans of action have to be employed, and when they start to mix and overlap it will compound the level of chin scratching. Some Nazi goons can be distracted, others will stay vigilant – others may patrol in a set path, meaning their watchful gaze is a constant evolving threat. Sprinkle in some Uber enemies that require a coordinated effort to take down and you have a vast and varied set of locks to be opened.

Herein lies the curse of such a gameplay experience, because really it boils down to trial and error – and the patience of the individual experiencing it. Make no mistake, the ability to QuickSave is present, meaning you can give your tactics a crack and if it all goes pear-shaped you are a single button press away from undoing your fate. But this is not appealing to an audience that is likely used to a more action-oriented experience and can be difficult when the game presents you with a situation that demands an observation period. To assist with this, the game actually offers a fast forward button, to speed up the happenings on screen and allow you a more streamlined passage of time when waiting for enemy patrols, or maybe waiting out a tripped alarm – but I would be lying if I said it was a proper solution for the amount of waiting the game asks you to do. Instead, I grew to be horrified at the thought of the game without the button – especially after the 50th tripped alarm that seemed to last an age.

Queuing up your team abilities is like deploying a Nazi killing Rube Goldberg machine

The game is somewhat intuitive but can be a struggle if you come from Mimimi’s tactical offerings – a bit like fingers that play a guitar struggling to play a banjo, you’ll need to do a little relearning. Initially, I struggled to click with the granular nature of your awareness, being that you can only observe a single enemy’s cone of view at a time – but over time, I realised that this is quite deliberate. The developers want you to employ everything at your disposal to disrupt, distract, and dispose of enemies – so make use of the queued action tool to synchronise attacks and chain together abilities. Pressing Shift will enter a record mode, where you can select WHO will do WHAT and WHERE, then exit the mode and have an ‘execute’ key ready to make it all happen at once. Throw a flash bomb to blind two guards, who will then not see the bear man running towards them to kill them in a flurry of blows, while your mad chemist woman channels drugs into the one sentry who was overseeing the whole courtyard.

The creativity on offer sends the game off the rails with how you can approach a situation and see about solving it. When you are rolling with most of your crew and queueing up a whole plethora of synchronised actions, the game starts to sing – every deathly instrument coming together in a brilliant crescendo of tactical genius. On more than one occasion I would actually reload a QuickSave, just to experience my dastardly plot once more – maybe this time from a more spectacular angle, it was that damn good.

What didn’t sing to me was the number of bugs I encountered during my playthrough, with more than a couple gobbling up huge portions of my evenings. A super exciting environmental kill opportunity would crash whenever I tried to use it, relegating me to have to dispatch the Uber enemy beneath by conventional means – while on other occasions I would have members of my crew get stuck on geometry, or worse, bug out and end up with a walking speed that was less than their sneaking gait. I also found myself needing to restart the game during longer sessions because the memory leak would cause the loading and saving of the game to gradually get slower and slower. One especially infuriating bug saw me devote close to two hours to meticulously clearing a mission, only to find that the final objective marker for where I needed to finish was no longer displaying on the map. Thankfully, a dig around my Steam screenshots folder revealed an earlier moment when it was still present and I didn’t need to sacrifice all that progress – but for anyone else in that position, it would likely prompt a keyboard and mouse to take flight across the room.

Nothing quite says “finesse” like killing a super Nazi by dropping a plane on them

Final Thoughts

Sumerian Six is clearly going to excite that contingent of weird and wonderful people who love to solve puzzles in a murder-y way. The aesthetic on offer, combined with the fun and fanciful tale of the Engima Squad meeting up and working together to take down a magical Nazi warlord, is plenty to grab you and hold tight. Just keep a pocketful of patience for any silly shit that happens while you’re save scumming your way to victory.

Reviewed on PC // Review code supplied by publisher

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