Expeditions Samurai: you think you are getting Commandos, you are actually getting Baldur's Gate 3 in a kimono, and that is no disappointment

First sensation on launching Expeditions Samurai: your hands settle back into a familiar position all by themselves. Top-down view, small squad, guards to work around, stealth. It smells like Commandos, and above all it smells like Shadow Tactics Blades of the Shogun, the samurai game from the German studio Mimimi, the very same team that later made Desperados III and its Mexican bandits. Same view, same Japan, same pleasure in working around a guard rather than charging him: the memory is instant.

Except it is a false friend, and you are better off knowing that before you buy.

The right lineage is the one you did not name

Shadow Tactics, like Commandos before it, is a real-time tactics game: everything runs continuously, you pause, you synchronise your four characters, you pray. Expeditions Samurai is a turn-based party RPG. The visual and thematic kinship is real, the mechanical one is not.

The other game you mentioned, though, the one you spent the year on, lands perfectly. A party of companions, turn-based combat, branching dialogue, relationships that turn into friendship, rivalry or romance depending on your actions: yes, the link with Baldur's Gate 3 makes sense. Same family, tighter, and without twenty-sided dice.

So if what you really have is the Shadow Tactics itch, the stopwatch stealth where you queue up four simultaneous actions before setting them all off at once, Expeditions Samurai will not scratch it. You are better off relaunching Shadow Tactics, which has not aged a day, and taking this one for what it is.

What the game actually offers

The setting is handsome and well chosen. The year is 1600. In history, the navigator William Adams lands in Japan and becomes the first European made a samurai. Here, Adams never leaves England: you arrive in his place, aboard the Dutch frigate De Albatros, leading a crew of privateers, straight into a civil war nearing its climax.

The combat system is the real curiosity. It is turn-based, but movement, attacks and interruptions can all play out simultaneously, which breaks the usual stiffness of the genre and brings the feel closer to a continuous skirmish. Alongside it sit stealth, gadgets, ambushes, and the option of resolving a situation through diplomacy rather than the sword.

Eight companions round out the package, each with their own quest chain, which you have to earn by winning their trust. And there is a two-player co-op mode, drop-in drop-out, in which both players act as twins, speak to characters at the same time and can pull the story in opposite directions. That is an idea I have not seen often, and it promises memorable evenings.

The word you must not ignore: early

Here is the caveat, and it is a big one. The game launches in Early Access, not as a finished version. Campfire Cabal and THQ Nordic promise a slice of story showing off almost every feature of the final game, with several hours of quests and full voice-over, then three major updates before a 1.0 currently aimed at 2027.

In plain terms: today you are paying for a portion. The studio owns the approach and justifies it as a return to the community spirit of the original Expeditions Conquistador, which is coherent. But if you are the sort who wants a whole campaign in one piece, like the one that occupied you for a year, you need to wait for 2027. That is not a flaw in the game, it is a state.

The second reservation concerns the studio and the series. The Expeditions games have always been dense RPGs, a little stiff, more interesting than elegant, and Campfire Cabal is adding stealth and co-op to an already loaded formula. The risk of a package pulling in several directions is real, and Early Access exists precisely to correct it.

For anyone who loves top-down views, parties of misfits and feudal Japan, the proposition remains very tempting. Just know what you are putting your hands into: not Commandos, but an ambitious tactical RPG that has not finished writing itself.