Ahoy, me hearties! Prepare for some supernatural swashbuckling… PETER HOSKIN reviews Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew

Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew (PlayStation, Xbox, PC, £39.99)

Verdict: Mission: Piractical 

Rating:

The games made by the German developers Mimimi are definitely for me, me, me!

You see, I’m the kind of guy who devoured the Commandos and Desperados series in the late 1990s and early 2000s – games in which you moved your little operatives across expansive maps, each of them deploying their very particular set of skills in service of a larger goal. They were Mission: Impossible in microcosm. A total blast.

And, practically alone, Mimimi are continuing that tradition. In fact, they made a Desperados III – a cowboy caper that was one of the best games of 2020. Before that, Shadow Tactics: Blades Of The Shogun.

The games made by the German developers Mimimi are definitely for me, me, me! You see, I’m the kind of guy who devoured the Commandos and Desperados series in the late 1990s and early 2000s

Strangely, though, I didn’t have especially high hopes in advance. The Pirates Of The Caribbean movies have rather done the whole supernatural swashbuckling thing to, well, death

And now Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew, which does the same thing but for pirates. Cursed pirates. 

With swords sticking out of them and stuff. It may well be the perfected form of this specific subgenre.

Strangely, though, I didn’t have especially high hopes in advance. The Pirates Of The Caribbean movies have rather done the whole supernatural swashbuckling thing to, well, death. 

And I worried that Mimimi might have done this type of game to death, too.

Yet it turns out that the new, odder setting is reinvigorating. Not only does it allow for a greater range of skills among your operatives – of course, in this world, the main character can teleport short distances to skewer the nefarious forces of the Inquisition – but it’s also unchained the designers’ imaginations all round.

And now Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew, which does the same thing but for pirates. Cursed pirates

There’s a lot more world— and character-building in this game than in its predecessors. 

The landscapes you roam across are wondrous and beautiful.

So sign me up to this crew — with skelly-man, plant-lady and weirdo-monkey — for ever more. Mimimi? Yo-ho-ho.

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