Commandos-Like Sumerian Six - supernatural Commandos where you fight demon-summoning Nazis

[Infinitron]

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1429850/view/4172101902800031512

Announcing Sumerian Six

- "Wer ist da" means... what?
I have a vivid memory of my friend's mom peeking into his room as we played Commandos (he was the first of our bunch to own a PC). She'd overhear a shout in German and quickly shuffle from the kitchen. She taught German language at our primary school, and couldn't miss the occasion to teach a thing or two. While I didn't have a knack for German, I did have a knack for Commandos and tactical games.

I liked Behind Enemy Lines, but truly loved Beyond The Call Of Duty. I found Commanos 2 too easy with all the ammo lying around begging you to cheese your way through, and wrestling with the camera and the few time limited missions of Commandos 3 felt like the challenge lied in the wrong place.

And even though apparently Commandos 2 outsold C:BEL, I always felt that the series took the wrong turn at that point, losing its puzzle-solving niche. At Artificer, we believe this genre is more puzzle than resource management or real time action. We also took fistful of inspirations from all the amazing Mimimi games - Shadow Tactics, Desperados 3 and Shadow Gambit - which we believe to be the best spiritual successors of the genre.

I believe a genre remains a niche as long as it remains nameless; seems to be called Commandos-like, like the FPS games were called Doom-likes in the 90s before that genre really took-off. The most fitting term for Commandos-likes, I believe, is "murder sudoku".

And so - I present to you SUMERIAN SIX, our murder sudoku about stabbin' nazis and blowing their shit up. Inspired by Arthur C. Clarke's law of "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", it follows a team of super-scientists using their wacky gizmos to rain pain on demon-unleashing nazis. I'm also particularly proud of the gallows humor frequent in the writing - along with the playfulness and combined power of toys at the player's disposal, it all accumulates to a fun, challenging and rewarding experience. Enjoy <3

Oh, and "Wer ist da" means "Who's there". I own this tiny speck of German language that I do remember to the Commandos (づ๑•ᴗ•๑)づ♡

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/strat...commandos-and-also-summons-up-literal-demons/

Sumerian Six is a WW2 stealth tactics game that summons up all my childhood memories of Desperados and Commandos, and also summons up literal demons​

You gotta take the good with the bad.

Is it just me, or are stealth tactics games making a quiet, extended comeback? I spent years of my childhood being very bad at Desperados, only for the entire genre to feel like it took a lengthy sabbatical some time in the mid-2000s. But look at us now: We've got Shadow Tactics, a new Commandos, and—just revealed at the PC Gaming Show—Sumerian Six: A Nazi-punching Indiana Jones-like stuffed to the gills with vision cones.

It looks very Commandos, which I mean as a compliment. Sumerian Six puts you in command of the "Enigma Squad," a cadre of spooky researchers who have pooled their talents to help take down the Third Reich.

That means a bunch of characters with a bunch of different abilities. You've got the creepy Mentalist, who I bet has the power to distract and otherwise muck around with guards; the Chemist, who I'd bet actual money will be able to toss a poison grenade at some point; and the Werebear, who is a bear. They are large.

Plus other characters whose names mean I don't feel confident guessing at their abilities, like The Siblings and The Old Man. Whatever they can do, they've all teamed up to take down a former squad member, Hans Kammler, who's been futzing around with occult weapons, Sumerian artefacts, and a demon from another dimension in order to unlock dread chthonic powers for his bosses in Berlin.

So you'd best put a stop to that. And you'll do it by creeping around outside of enemies' lines of sight, deploying special abilities and equipment, and otherwise making life very difficult for the Nazi war machine in a hundred subtle ways. Or by turning into a bear and eating them. Whatever you need to do to preserve democracy.

There's no hard release date on this one, but the devs at Artificer reckon they'll have it ready by late summer this year. If, like me, you think there ought to be more stealth tactics in this grey old world of ours, you'll be able to find it over on Steam.

 

[Lemming42]

Yeah alright I'll play this shit.

EDIT: Watched the trailer and christ, so many of these games have such awful arseholes as the main cast, and it looks like this is no exception. It takes a lot of effort to have your heroes be up against the fucking Nazis and still have them come across as insufferable pillocks but game writers keep somehow managing it.

The key to making these games work is to have a lot of different ability types that allow different playstyles and AI manipulation so hopefully the trailer was just showing the most meme-able ones, and the actual game will have a lot more interesting and varied abilities than "click guard to disintegrate him" or "click guard to shoot him" or "click guard to maul him" or "click guard to stab him". The weird siblings looked cool, shades of Isabelle from Desperados.

 

[thesheeep]

There seem to be a lot of these games coming out recently, none of which do well.
Even the ones that did best (commercially) were not successful enough to prevent their makers from shutting down.

How do these projects keep getting greenlit? This really baffles me.
Do they have much lower production costs than other genres or sth?

 

[Gandalf]

So, a mix of Commandos and Wolfenstein? I had the same idea (minus the freak-paranormal heroes). Trailer reminded me of comedy movies trailers, which is not cool. Other than that realtime stealth tactics is my niche, I'll probably check it out.

 

[normie]

from the makers of the flop, Showgunners, comes more gae

 

[Lemming42]

Demo of this is out. I'm going in.

 

[luj1]

how whimsical

 

[Lemming42]

I'm on the second map of the demo. Thoughts:

- It's very competently made. It doesn't quite have the level of deluxe ultra-polish that Mimimi games did but it's ten steps ahead of Stargate Timekeepers.

- Story is perfunctory, it's basically just an excuse to put you in the usual real-time tactics situations. Protagonists are extremely unlikeable, which again, is a staggering achievement when the only other characters are the fucking Nazis. I'm about an hour in and I've already decided to just skip cutscenes and dialogue.

- No knockout ability, which is a shame because that was a superb extra layer of challenge for anyone who wanted to take that route in Commandos/Desperados or the Mimimi games.

- Mission objectives so far tend to be "kill everyone in this area", meaning that you don't have the same freedom of approach you did in other games of this genre (though there are still a lot of different ways to wipe everyone out). You can ghost up until that point, at least.

- Perhaps because the devs didn't expect you to actually try to ghost through levels, stealth abilities are comically overpowered. The first map in the demo is a big castle and I passed through the entire thing with only two abilities, dude's Flash Bomb and lady's Cloaking Device. Obviously hard to judge the difficulty just from the first two levels, but these abilities are very powerful.

- Cool thing: enemies hit by distractions will look around afterward, rather than just immediately going back to their usual patrol.

- Outside stupid abilities, characters are pretty balanced in terms of their strengths and weaknesses, so there's lots of parts like in Desperados 3 where someone will have to climb up some vines to find an alternate route for the chunky idiots who can't climb.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Feels like a typical Mimimi copycat. Competent, but not truly compelling.

 

[Fargus]

Whoa you just melted the guy *laughs in Marvel*

 

[AndyS]

Yeah alright I'll play this shit.

EDIT: Watched the trailer and christ, so many of these games have such awful arseholes as the main cast, and it looks like this is no exception. It takes a lot of effort to have your heroes be up against the fucking Nazis and still have them come across as insufferable pillocks but game writers keep somehow managing it.

There's no sense of portraying the protagonists as serious professionals. They seem like children written by children. Look at something like The Guns of Navarone (book or movie, either is fine) and see how different it is.

 

[Harthwain]

When I saw the title I thought "You're playing as the Sumerians with superpowers who are fighting demon-summoning Nazis? Sounds weird but interesting". Then I checked it out and saw you aren't actually playing as the Sumerians and now I am disappointed, and my day is ruined. Thanks a lot.