IF you haven't played any Mimimi game => not recommended, but only because the next few (desperados 3, shadow gambit, ...) kept improving on the formula, and the engine/UX will simply provide a far better newcomer experience.

IF you did play some of them, you know what to expect. This is a bit clunkier, as is to be expected, the overall difficulty ramps up significantly faster (in no small part due to the clunk, notably the camera's rougher angles & shorter dezoom range reducing information gathering).

Except for what pretty much boils down to having a few more/less years worth of experience creating these games, you can expect the best of the genre across all these games. Varied characters gameplay-wise, each with immersive banter and backstory, lore-appropriate maps/music/ambiance, great replayability. Controls are still a tiny bit lacking (and coming from the later games doesn't help), but the gist of it is still there.

Being the older brother, it's also the one that gets the deepest discounts though, so on sale this can easily make up for that (4€ at time of review). Personally I'd recommend shelling out a bit more [but] getting the later games, coming back to this once you've exhausted those.

Beautiful tactical.

Pros :

- kill stuff (well, mostly guards) in a beautiful Edo-era Japan ;
- various array of tactics to take down your enemies, with challenging situations (you probably won't be bored with that one);
- each character has a great personality, which adds even more flavor to a nice storyline ;
- to be a ninja or a kunoichi really feels good in this game.

Cons :

- you will scratch your head more than once with this one. Prepare to die a lot, and retry a lot to fully handle what you have to do ;
- if you want to unlock everything, arm yourself with patience, for you will retry stuff over and over and over....

Time to scarper... this samurai is getting suspicious of me.

This is commandos but with ninjas. Awesome story, Awesome gameplay. Each mission can take hours to play and more to master