Shogun Showdown: Samurai Combo Shuffling

In the beginning of this year, I was pleasantly surprised by a little Western-themed gunslinging game called Guncho. In Guncho, you take turns in a hexagonal grid killing everyone on sight before moving on to the next randomized level. Shogun Showdown feels very much like a medieval Japanese version of Guncho: it is very puzzly, has you carefully consider your moves, and one wrong move can screw up the entire battle strategy. And that’s a good thing!

Despite my general distaste for roguelikes, all the raving reviews, the attractive pixel art, and the fact that it’s a turn-based strategy made me import a copy from Play-Asia anyway. I’m glad that I did because I can now happily confirm that the game is as good as everyone has been saying it is. Yes, despite the sometimes annoying roguelike elements that I still find iffy at best.

In Shogun Showdown, you move up and down a very limited one-dimensional combat space: sometimes it’s just shuffling back and forth on three tiles. Every action on your behalf triggers an action for the enemy. To get rid of them, you have to load up and execute skills presented to you as a limited amount of collectable and upgradable tiles. For example, a tile could be as simple as a forward slash attack that does 2 damage—but you can add a poison effect on it or boost the damage factor. Be warned, though, as upgrades also come with downsides, such as an increased cooldown. The trick is to get a tile to 5 damage as that’s enough to one-shot any non-boss enemy and to decrease the cooldown as much as possible, enabling quick re-uses of said tile to avoid being cornered.

In-between every few encounters you can upgrade one tile with a randomized effect that can be re-rolled to reduce the annoying “swingy roguelike-effect”—provided you have the money. This mechanic is much more forgiving than opening up a random chest and pulling out a useless randomized item (oh hi Nightmare Reaper): you first get to see the effect of the update and then can decide to either apply, re-roll, or ignore it.

Many folks compare Shogun Showdown to a deck builder because of the tile upgrade mechanic but there’s zero discarding/shuffling/anything else involved that games like Floppy Knight do roll with, even to move around your units, so I’d rather stick with the Guncho comparison. Every wrong move is just as deadly here.

After making enough progress in the game, you unlock other warriors with their own unique abilities and two starting tiles. The starting wanderer has the ability to switch places when facing an enemy—see, that’s exactly my favourite Guncho skill, I told you! Others include pushing enemies into others and damaging them at the cost of having a bit less mobility in crowded battle scenes.

Just like in Guncho (OK I’ll stop), your silent warrior can rack up combo-kills that in turn trigger combo-specific skills. While these are difficult but cool to pull off, I learned to avoid them like the plague: enemies waiting to take a potshot at you are blocked by other enemies that suddenly can take their shot when their meat shield buddy is gone. Ranged backline enemies are probably the most dangerous ones in the game as once their tile is flashing, there’s nothing you can do to prevent them from hitting you. That’s why tiles like lightning that hit the last instead of first enemies can be very useful.

Showdown is very good at gradually teaching you the ropes: each stage introduces a new enemy type whose attack patterns you’ll have to figure out, and after finishing a stage, depending on the amount of hits you took, the game rewards you with a simple but powerful message: OBLITERATED, CLEARED, or if you barely managed to scrape by, SURVIVED. And trust me, you will often see that last one, as if the game is mocking you for your poor decisions. It is a turn-based game so you can take your time. That doesn’t mean the consequences are easy to oversee and that also doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to play whilst keeping track of that television show your wife is watching. Oh whoops, wrong move, uh oh. Died again? Restart, rinse, repeat. Oh yes, it comes with lots of statistics for the nerds who want to keep track of their and their enemies’ death count.

In true roguelike fashion, though, you get to keep a special currency—skulls—gained by defeating bosses that can be exchanged for permanent shop upgrades or new tiles to be added to the pool of appearing ones for sale in said shops. For those in need, some enemies drop consumables such as green tea that refills a small portion of your HP bar. You can initially only carry three consumables so choose wisely—or upgrade your sack at the shop. Or sell them for cold hard cash to dump into reducing that cooldown to zero.

The simple but effective pixel art and matching soundtrack that doesn’t stand in your way while overthinking possible moves are an okay match. As a sucker for 2D pixels, I liked this one more than Guncho’s awkward 3D models (ah dang it). Weirdly enough, this is also made in Unity? Yet the background art is quite generic and some of the character art makes it difficult to even see what side the character is facing. Most later levels are shrouded in a drab of darkness. As for the music by Oscar di Mondogemello, it has a pleasantly gritty 8-bit-esque feeling to it that gets more tense as you make your way towards the Shogun’s castle.

After defeating the Shogun, more difficult versions of the same stages are unlocked to keep you busy even longer, but (thankfully) Showdown isn’t a huge timesink. I put in about 8 hours, unlocking enough to properly explore what the game was about. As always with these kinds of games, you can keep on going and going and …

To conclude, while Shogun Showdown might look like a humble TBS game that has little to offer, it’s actually offering a devilishly deep challenge gradually increasing the difficulty that’s a perfect match for my Switch—even for roguelike sceptics like me. The fact that most of the work is done by one person that was initially combining the development with working full-time as a software developer only makes me respect it more.