Sumerian Six Review (PC) – Shadow of the Third Reich
I am so glad that Sumerian Six exists. In the wake of Mimimi Games being closed, I lamented the new end to a genre I love. I had been so grateful for the recent spate of Commandos revival-type games – the trilogy of Desperados 3 and the two Shadow games that had revived a genre. Sumerian Six suddenly swings into the breach, the first game from another studio to capitalise on the genre. I hope more follow.
With expertise in a string of well-received XCom-like turn-based tactics titles like Showgunners, Artificer has turned to real-time tactics and joined the Devolver Digital umbrella for this release. Sumerian Six combines a World War II narrative, much in the style of Indiana Jones and Nazis looking for magical relics, with stealth tactics, far-fetched magical abilities and a wonderful nostalgic top-down perspective.
Before we get into things, these types of clear-the-map, top-down stealth games are among my favourite of all genres, so going in I’m a major fan of the style. I have played everything I’ve mentioned above – all the Commandos, Desperados and Shadow titles – and will be coming at this review from a place of high genre experience.
Indiana Jones and the Viewcone of Doom
Those pesky nazis be experimenting with terrifying tech again. Sumerian Six gets right into the narrative using the first mission as your tutorial, but also as a fairly deft intro to the characters and the world, and does so with panache. The first four or so missions are still introducing the six characters, so there are new moves to learn for at least half the game and one doesn’t really appear until the sixth mission.
The opening crawl states that Kammler, a former member of your squad of commando scientists (yep, commando scientists) has been experimenting with a powerful mystical substance named Geiststoff that could power the entire world, but in the wrong hands could destroy it. He is a nazi, so by definition, it’s in the wrong hands. Of course, it’s up to you to stop him.
Enter the Sumerian Six, a bonkers lineup of scientists with occult-scientific abilities. There’s golden boy Sid, who can ride around the map in the minds of his enemies; Isabelle, his sister, who can teleport/replace her foes with her own body; their father Alastair who wields chain-lightning and traps; Wojtek, an unfortunate man-turned-Werebear who can take out whole groups and maul the larger minigun-touting Panzerwolf enemies singlehandedly; unhinged chemist Rosa, who can pump Nazis with chemicals that make them dazed, melt into nothing, or even explode; and mentalist Siegfried, who has possibly too many abilities, including a retrievable sniper, an invisibility zone for allies and projecting himself to distract enemies. It’s a fantastic lineup of characters and powers to give the nazis a really bad day.
Considering the direction the recent Shadow Gambit went, with supernatural abilities and cursed pirates, having magical powers in a stealth game now feels perfectly acceptable, but at the same time almost none of them feel like a copy of something I played in that title. Somehow Artificer managed to think of six characters with complementary powers that all add wonderful inventive new abilities to experiment with.
The team must sneak and assassinate their way across ten levels of increasing difficulty, as they recruit allies, follow across the world as Isabelle is kidnapped and made to translate Sumerian texts, and eventually catch up to Kammler in time to stop his nefarious plans.
Scientists of Courage
If you’ve played any of the mentioned titles you know how the gameplay works, and beyond the unique powers, the style and actions are basically those we’ve come to expect. But for the uninitiated you use your mouse and keyboard to guide your commando-scientists across the levels, hiding, crouching, sneaking etc, and then using your array of powers to distract or dispatch every nazi in your path to the goal.
There’s a free camera that can rotate fully to view your sneaky approach from any angle, and the ubiquitous (for this genre at least) quick save is very much available. You can also plan out actions in a type of pause menu and then execute multiple kills at once because let’s face it, those nazis be covering each other’s backs a lot. It’s not quite the innovative quick-save-as-narrative used in Shadow Gambit, but it will be familiar to anyone who’s played all the others leading up to that point.
Enemies have green view cones, areas of visibility and lesser visibility such as in darkness, and if they see you they will shoot on site and probably set off a nearby alarm too. In Sumerian Six, the alarms are quite visible and you can often sabotage them as you progress through the levels. Think of it as a top-down Hitman and you won’t be going far wrong.
Distinctly in Sumerian Six, each skill you use, from a distracting flash bomb to a crushing bearhug, gains exp with use and can be levelled up a few times to gain spread, speed, or other stats. I really loved the attention to detail in having all the countdowns to level-up available across your HUD at any time – it felt like the early days of Xbox Achievements like in Gears of War when it would count your progress.
Each area is its own special puzzle, from the larger macro levels to the smaller contained plazas, one guard covering a guard, covering another guard. Where is the first guard that isn’t being covered, or how can I break up a patrol? How do I get through this puzzle with the skills and moves available to me? It’s cerebral stuff, and it’s about the most gamified I like my games to get. It works on a sort of Portal level, fun puzzles to solve, but instead of holes in the wall, it’s stealthing your way past nazis, or clearing every part of the map.
I enjoyed the few slightly different scenarios in Sumerian Six too. In mission 3 for example, you have double agents, and the task is to clear the area while keeping unseen by that particular enemy and leaving them alive. I’m not sure I’ve been asked to leave alive the one enemy watching the whole area very often in this type of real-time tactics game, so it was a lot of fun. And that level overall is a masterclass in self-contained areas demonstrating new skills, in this case for Wojtek the Werebear.
Beyond the heavy Panzerwolves which take a double or big hit to kill, there are also Geists, which are these plugged-in teleporting nazi officers, and you’ve got to turn off their supply of energy and then kill them in the next few seconds, else they start teleporting round the map peering into everywhere you’ve forgotten to hide bodies. A great addition that forced me to line up simultaneous movements quite regularly.
Sumerian Six is not a complete copy of the Commandos games, or Mimimi’s works – it has it’s own style, its own Indiana Jones tone, and it brings new abilities and ways of playing to the table. It’s going to feel incredibly familiar to those who like and play this genre. It’s the kind of familiar that you get from cuddling up with a warm cat though, in that everything plays and controls the way you expect, just with a new world, story, characters, and abilities.
Behind Enemy Lines
Playing on PC there were a number of graphical settings and levels to find the sweet spot for your own rig, and credit must go to just the sheer number of options. At peak or ‘Ultra’, Sumerian Six ran smooth as butter, with a consistent 60fps or higher and the environments have some wonderful lighting, colour and shadow work. Everything looks top-notch. You can dial it back though if that setting is quickly melting your PC. I went down as low as Medium for test purposes and still could only find fault in some textures and edges that became a bit jagged. Even then, playing with the anti-aliasing settings cleared it up, and allowed my rig to cool down again.
Level design is wonderfully done and takes full advantage of the genre, from the placing of guards and obstacles, to the general locales themselves. You’ll be in European areas one mission, then deep desert mining facilities or Sumerian jungles and tropics the next. The main team are all voiced and well-acted, but nothing stood out to me as particularly good or bad. Musically I found the soundtrack generally felt the same from mission to mission – there’s clearly a similar theme recurring throughout – but it was nicely dynamic with little gameplay-based crescendos when you dispatched a nazi or escaped their notice.
Raiders of the Lost Texts
Sounds pretty good all round, doesn’t it? Sumerian Six is a fantastic indie release in the real-time tactics stealth genre. However, there are a few things holding it back from greatness. Overall I found the story too formulaic and obvious and after the recent quality of Mimimi’s output, it ended up coming off as not so accomplished. This is their first try at this style. Characters are fairly one-dimensional and the plot doesn’t do much I wasn’t expecting.
I also didn’t enjoy the way it was presented in cutscenes. In Sumerian Six, cutscenes aren’t animated – they are still-frame shots with voiceover, that try to tell an action scene a little like a comic. They sort of slowly move or revolve, but end up looking like what AI can manage at this point. I found it pretty disappointing, and in some scenes almost impossible to follow. There’s one near the middle of the game where the end of the mission involves chasing Kammler through a portal, but the direction and shots are really hard to follow, and the voiceover was the only thing making sense until the portal was closed. I really would have preferred these scenes were animated in the top-down mission style.
The last thing I’ll mention is that there were some issues with a temperamental camera, mostly with it doing what it’s meant to, but not what I was expecting, like locking to a character. It doesn’t quite have the free movement I felt the genre had now reached. The more I practiced with it the better I got, so maybe just a case of getting used to it.
Destination Sumeria
Sumerian Six is a superb addition to the real-time tactics stealth genre pioneered by Commandos and the recent releases from Mimimi games. Clearly, Devolver saw that Artificer had managed to capture this essence at a high-quality mark and maybe, just maybe, they could take on the mantle so recently relinquished by Mimimi.
I was pleasantly surprised by its quality throughout, from the tight and intricate puzzling and stealth gameplay to the fantastic abilities, from the great Indiana Jones and Nazis theme to the crisp graphics.
If you are lamenting the demise of Mimimi, or you just can’t wait for Commandos Origins in the next few months, Sumerian Six is going to be right up your street. A fantastic high-quality stealth adventure that scratches that itch and hopefully passes the torch on to a new developer.
A high-quality real-time tactics stealth title, Sumerian Six is full of intricate missions and wonderfully unique scientific abilities for you to unleash upon those pesky Nazis. Artificer have taken the torch from Mimimi Games and are running with it, and I’m so glad they are.
Sumerian Six is available now on PC via Steam (review platform).
Developer: Artificer
Publisher: Devolver Digital
Disclaimer: In order to complete this review, we were provided with a promotional copy of the game. For our full review policy, please go here.
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