If there’s nothing I love more, it’s punching Nazi’s. Now, I’ve never had the pleasure in real-life, but in video game form its a smorgasbord. Sumerian Six is the next great Nazi-punching adventure, and a fantastic game own its own without that. Coming from Showgunners developers Artificer, Sumerian Six is a combat puzzle to be solved by using real-time tactics, and it’s up to you whether it is done stealthy or not. Sumerian Six fills a gap in the real-time tactics genre, and is impeccably detailed and fun, making it an unforgettable gem.
The story begins with an explainer that a group of scientists discovered something awful after the first World War, and meant to keep it hidden forever. Hitler assembled key folks from that project to resurrect it. To stop him, the scientists who worked on that project (six of them, in fact), reform the “Enigma Squad” to stop Hitler in the second World War from getting his hands on the Geiststoff, which is a powerful energy capable of creating the Wunderwaffe (wonder weapon). Assembling a team of scientists is a far more interesting premise than just an assault squad with military training. This sets Sumerian Six off a journey of science vs the occult that you haven’t seen before.
The early missions of Sumerian Six are about “assembling the team”. You’ll be killing Nazi’s right, left, and center, but along the way gaining control of each of the six characters and their impressive abilities. First up is Sid, he can shoot a gun, and hitchhike inside of enemies to get places he normally wouldn’t. Isabella is the sister of Sid, she can cloak herself, lure enemies with bright lights, and swap places with an enemy leaving them stunned for another squad member to eliminate. Rosa is a woman with a vendetta and killer abilities: she can make enemies dissolve, move them from their position, and what I think to be an overpowered ability, make someone a human bomb who will cause collateral damage. You get to command a Bear that can pick-up any and everything, kill groups of enemies, or carry up to two bodies at once – to be fair, Wojtek is the human form of the bear you can turn into. Alistair is the father of Sid and Isabella (it’s a family affair), and he can use chain lightning to kill nearby enemies, or launch enemies and friendlies to new heights. Lastly is Siegfried, who can scare enemies as a distraction, or can fire a soul bolt that goes far and can be retrieved for future use. Each of these characters are enigmatic and outlandish, but so is a lot of the game. Their later abilities really shine, allowing you to create really devastating combinations and uses.
Recently, the folks at Mimimi Games were making new real-time tactics games with Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun, Desperados III, and their swan song of Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew. They have since closed their doors (willingly), so Sumerian Six is here in its wake. This quirky game of weird science with a healthy amount of experimentation. You’ll be relying on the quicksave and quickload buttons quite often. This is a game of trial-and-error, and you should want to try wacky things to see if they work or not. This game doesn’t remind you like the aforementioned games from Mimimi, but there are autosaves that those games didn’t have, who will assist in case you forget. One of the best features is the action planner, it will freeze time, allowing you to queue up moves with all the available characters in a mission to be executed at once – this ensures clean kills and that no alarms get sounded. It becomes an essential feature as you approach each successive mission. With all of the character abilities, the ways to save and reload quickly, and clever gameplay systems, there’s little frustration to be had.
You don’t have to try distinguish between lethal and non-lethal attacks, it’s a non-issue because there is only kill (because they’re Nazi’s, remember?) I think this is good for many reasons, because there’s some creative but deadly abilities to put to use, and not being able to kill using them would take away half the fun. Each enemy has vision cones, there’s a dashed line that means they can’t see you when crouched, and solid means they will see you even if you are crouched. Though it’s here the game slows down, allowing you a small window of time to exit their sight to keep the element of surprise. Should you trip an alarm, you can kill the person that called it, and in thirty seconds, so long as you aren’t seen, will reset. Stealth is not paramount, but it does ensure survivability because these are scientists, not military members.
There are ten levels in the game, each taking anywhere from one to two hours to complete. The latter amount of time is if you’re playing stealthy and trying to stay unseen. So you can expect around a 20 hour game, and it’s a visually diverse and satisfying labyrinth of tactics to employ. The first level you start in is Lowenfels Castle, it’s a snowy castle base where the story kicks off, and serves as a great tutorial for the first two characters and basics of play. After that you’re ushered to Lilleby in a solo mission until you can free another character. You’ll traverse various locations like an oil depot, a station, a base, and even Norway with spectacular views of the northern lights. Artificer really made each location feel unique, with lots of secrets to find like XP and ability boosters, it’s all very well thought out.
The enemies throughout the game, even as you encounter more advanced types, are not very smart. In most scenarios they will not notice if someone’s missing from their post, only if they are a conversation partner to them, and regularly speak to them in their rounds. On every map, there’s one or several traps that you can use to trigger accidents. If you can utilize these, you won’t prompt a full alert, because to all the enemies it’ll seem just an accident. Interestingly, running doesn’t make additional sound over walking or crouching – this is very forgiving on part of Artificer. You’re given freedom to explore, but while that leash isn’t short, you’ll feel the limitations with invisible walls and blocked pathways.
There’s map you can reference that will remind of you objectives, though the minimap is far more important in the context of real-time. You can press ‘H’ on the keyboard to highlight all enemies an objectives, giving you an immediate reference point of what is interactable. As you play through more of the campaign, optional objectives begin to appear, and are rewarding to complete. If you’re tired of waiting for an enemy to complete his patrol, you can press ‘X’ to fast forward time until they get themselves into position, ready for you to pounce. The game’s full of opportunities, both for you to take and to make.
Throughout my time in the game, I rarely had any issues. There was a problem around autosaves not generating once I triggered an alarm, but those have been fixed. I did find that I could cheese the vision cones of enemies to reach places unseen, allowing me to utilize a move in complete silence that I likely shouldn’t. Aside from that, the game is rather polished.
I was able to run the game on Ultra with DLAA to achieve a consistent 130fps. The game does not have other NVIDIA technology tools like Reflex or Frame Generation, but that’s likely due to the fact that it doesn’t have RTX. I can’t see a place where this would enhance anything, but I did notice its absence. By default, there is a cartoon shader enabled that I guess makes the game look more like a comic book. While I enjoyed what it was going for, I turned off the ‘toon shading’ and ‘toon outlines’ for to reduce the visual noise. What remained was a clean and crisp looking game. To note, I did not notice any performance impact with it on versus off. Sumerian Six runs on Unreal Engine 5, and looks great while doing it.
My PC Specs:
– Microsoft Windows 11 Pro
– Intel Core i9 13900K @ 5.8GHz
– ASUS ROG RYUJIN II 360 ARGB AIO Liquid CPU Cooler
– G.SKILL TRIDENT Z5 6000MHZ 64GB (32×2) DDR5 RAM
– ASUS ROG Strix GeForce RTX 4080 16GB GDDR6X
– WD_BLACK SN850X M.2 (4 TB)
– LG UltraGear 34GP950B-G (21:9 Ultrawide @ 3440×1440)
Sumerian Six is immensely replayable, both as a whole game and individual levels. The game is not as an impeccable as the games it was so clearly inspired by, but it is very good at what it does. I did find Sumerian Six to be a little easy, even on its hardest skill setting. That said, this is a game that’s very approachable and accessible, and could be someone’s first game in the genre to acquainted. Artificer is keeping the real-time tactics genre alive with Sumerian Six, an enjoyable romp as it delves into the occult and science, and of course killing Nazi’s never gets old.
A Steam code was provided in advance by the publisher for review purposes
