Partisans is a strange game, it has some very unique ideas but the execution leaves a lot to be desired.

(I got to mission 9 of 15 when writing this initial review but ended up continuing on to finish the game the next day, so updated).

But let's start with the good. Unlike similar isometric stealth games Partisans has a loot system where you can pick up equipment, weapons, and ammo for use on the field. This includes food and materials which are used for the base management side of the game. It's a neat idea and your party members can make use of literally anything at their disposal no matter who they are. The range of items is vast and anyone can equip anything which is a cool feature. Need someone with rocks to throw as distractions? sure. Want a dedicated medic? easy. Party members have a couple of individual skills to differentiate them (usually weapon based), so team member choice is still important but doesn't gate-keep specific strategies.

Another addition is the camp management between missions. You have to produce enough food to keep your team healthy as it grows, enough materials to help make improvements like, weapon upgrade benches, better food production, creating items, and so on. So long as you assign everyone a job around production and food each day and upgrade asap it quickly becomes a non-issue and sadly kind of redundant as a feature, which is a shame since as a concept it's pretty solid.

That's kind of where the good points end...

The first problem and my biggest personal issue with this game: it has fog of war. Why is this an issue? Firstly from a planning perspective this is a terrible idea for real-time stealth when timing and planning are paramount. Enemies can see you from time to time in the fog out of your vision range so can get spotted by someone you didn't even know existed. This ruins quick decision making just becomes a laborious slow trudge through levels. There isn't a dedicated crouch or prone as such; you have "stealth mode" where you move slower and crouch once you get close enough to an enemy. Their FOV cone is their "absolute" vision (sometimes, not often with how buggy this is).

The next problem: the controls. Left click as a command literally does everything. Movement, picking up bodies, and interacting with objects end up as the wrong action because something else was either close by or in the way. Having ctrl + click would prevent this but you can't remap ANY controls at all. The pointer precision is also off so you can't be exact with your movements or actions so sloppy looking mistakes are genuinely through no fault of your own. Autopathing is also not great - moving groups into bushes is clumsy and usually has one bump the other out and into full enemy view.

AI detection is probably the biggest offender because it doesn't even play by its own rules. There no viewcone indicator to tell you who can see you except for a small "!" above the persons head, and if they're in fog of war? no indication at all except a ping sound. The detection gauge also fills based on noise. Fine in theory, but the noise detection radii doesn't match the noise radii you make as yours is apparently way bigger than what it says. Enemies will still hear you even if you think you're out of the noise ripple when going for a melee kill. Even moving slowly into bushes can set it off so everything you think is safe carries some weird disproportionate risk. There's close to less zero buffer between an enemy seeing you and the alert being set off so multi-kills are often impractical and require absolute perfect timing with no leeway, which causes a lot of frustration of lots of quickloading for just trying to go for basic kills.

Better still, sometimes an enemy can instant alert the second you hit their FOV with no detection gauge fill - I can't work out if it's because after being in combat prior everyone is on high alert or if it's a legitimate bug? Being in vision whilst carrying a body is also an instant alert, made worse with carrying bodies being painfully slow even with party members who can upgrade that stat. I've sometimes even had enemies who are off my screen somehow alerted visually to my character and come rushing over to investigate. Again I have no idea why and can only assume it's another bug.

The next glaring issue is the "tactical pause". For some reason you HAVE to execute the plan the second you leave the pause, which can be awkward if you want to scout the situation before confirming your actions. It's only a small QOL difference but it's a massive change when compared to other games of this genre that use the same system and is worse for it. With the tiny detection alert window on top I just gave up using this and opted for solo kills instead.

For a stealth game there's also a LOT of combat you're forced into. Sections of the map act as cover, and hit chances are calculated based on range, weapon stats, and enemy cover aka an XCOM-lite. Staying in cover you can normally let the fights play out themselves and your team will generally come out unharmed vs small groups. Overall I'm not entirely sold on how this plays since more often than not these fights are against an absolute army of 12+ enemies vs your 3 team members and the awkward mechanics make slow stealth hard enough, never mind swift combat. There's also a horrible horde-esque mission where your patience will truly be put to the test by this mode, it's not fun :)

The map design is your standard fare of large forests, train stations, enemy bases, the usual WW2-esque stuff. There's no verticality so no ladders mechanics, vantage points, or similar. These maps are also massive and expansive but that's also where the design falls flat. 9/10 times you can skirt around the perimeter of a map and avoid a LOT of troublesome stuff. The last mission becomes trivialised by doing this as you can just sneak to the top corner, fetch the key and you're into the main building with no effort. After that I opted to just run and gun my way through because apparently there's one type of enemy that refused to walk through open doorways so I hocked grenades through until it was all clear, and I wanted the game done and finished by this point.

In summary, Partisans has a more novel approach to real-time stealth with a unique blend of real-time strategy and top-down shooter but is severely bogged down by a very finicky system, odd bugs, and mechanics that just don't really mesh well with games of this type. There's some interesting foundation here, but it needs a lot of work to bring it up to the same level of it's predecessors that it's trying to compete with.