Sumerian Six: Hands-on Preview
If you’re watching the niches of gaming enough, you can spot stuff really breaking out into the mainstream. It’s pretty rare, but every generation tends to have that one title that breaks through. Helldivers 2, Phasmophobia, and even watching my beloved Atelier series break out with Atelier Ryza, all of these were games that put the genre or series on the map. Stealth tactics games are yet to have this, but I think we’re on the cusp.
Sumerian Six might just be that game. There’s been quite a few contenders for the top dog spot, but I honestly think that the Indiana Jones vibe with character banter, Nazi punching, and occultism might be the right formula. After playing through the preview build, I was left wanting more and that’s a really great sign.
You play as the Enigma Squad, a small group of people with very mixed talents but sharing the same purpose; to stop Kammler from trying to summon a demon. He secretly got his hands on a resource called Geiststoff, which could have been a source of unlimited clean energy before the research was abandoned due to being too dangerous.
I was only able to play 2 missions in the demo, which is now available in the Steam Next Fest. But this was a really good taste of what’s to come. In the first level, you’ll play as The Siblings, Isabella and her adopted brother, Sid. Their mission is to infiltrate Kammler’s study and find out what his experiments are. Easy enough. Unfortunately, it’s constantly under guard so you’ll need to sneak, stab and trick your way in.
Sid’s powers are mostly focused on stealth. He can disappear ‘into’ an enemy to hitchhike on them, allowing him to move into a better position as they make the rounds. He can throw a flash bang that blinds them for a short period, and his melee attack draws a lot less noise than others. On the flip side, he must stand up to pick up the bodies of enemies, which makes him completely visible.
Isabella on the other hand is stronger. Her weapon is louder, but she can swap places with an enemy and cause a distraction. She can also turn completely invisible for a short amount of time. Characters have a pretty wide variety of skills, but you’ll often need to use all of them in a mission to succeed.
There’s a lot to like here. The mission introductions play out like a mission briefing room, but chalk marks will appear on the map, pointing out places of interest as they zoom around. It gives a very cool aesthetic where it shows you what’s needed whilst also instructing you on the important things. Zooming out on the map also brings a more tactical view, while changing the way it looks to a sepia map. The map nerd in me got very excited about this. The banter seems pretty good too; mission introductions gave a real Ocean’s Eleven feel.
The missions are quite fun too. Skill boxes are strewn about the level which gives a good reason to investigate around, as these provide permanent bonuses to a skill. They do level as you use them, but the skill boxes are a much better source. Levelling is consistent between missions too, so if you’re having trouble with the game’s secondary objectives, such as beating a mission in so many minutes, or not getting the alarm raised for example, you can return to them later to give them another crack.
The level design on the first mission is very linear, with the variety coming from how you approach each encounter rather than in the pathing. The second mission is much more open, giving you three paths to consider, each with strengths and weaknesses. I think this will be much more representative of the final game, where the first acts like a bit more like a tutorial. Either way, both missions are very fun and that’s the most important thing.
A lot of the mechanics are very reminiscent of Mimimi game design. Controlling multiple characters is made easy through the use of hotkeys, you can focus on enemies’ vision cones whilst doing other things, and complex manoeuvres can be done all at once with the action planner; a critical tool in making characters do things all in unison.
As I said, there’s a lot to love about this game, even in this early state. Also, the menu music is a banger. It’s got a demo on the Steam store at the moment, so if you’re even a bit curious then the only thing lost is a bit of time. All in all, though, this is shaping up to be a really great entry in the real-time tactics genre.
