Commando Scientists, Nazis, Demons, chemical warfare and real-time stealth. Sumerian Six is a wildly ambitious, unique game coming from Artificer. Discover arcane mysteries and wield experimental tech as you attempt to sway and change the course of World War II.

Sumerian Six is the newest game coming from the developer behind Showgunners, one of the most enjoyable games I got to go hands on with in 2023. Moving away from the X-Com tactics style of turn based action, Sumerian Six attempts to take the visual stylings of that genre of game, and swap it up. A real-time tactical stealth game, you control a small group of characters with unique and encounter changing abilities. How does it stack up though?

Sumerian Six is a fairly approachable tactical stealth game. Stealth games in general often have issues finding a middle ground between genuinely challenging and painfully obnoxious. Sumerian Six offers a range of difficulty options, so that players of all skill levels should be able to access and play the game. Normal felt the most balanced, with not being far too easy and brute-forceable, but without being so obnoxious that I couldn’t physically see any solutions to the battles. Solutions is the apt way of putting it too, as Sumerian Six doesn’t feel so much like a real-time adventure, so much as a stealth puzzle game.

On average, I found most stages took around an hour to complete, as the battlefields are quite large and there is a decent chunk of enemy units to stealth your way through and eliminate in each of the chapters. Around chapter five I did find that the game started to feel somewhat overwhelming. There were a lot of enemies, a lot of unique enemy types that require either a specific unit or approach to take them out, and incredibly large and long maps with many objectives through them. The puzzle-like approach to the chapters in turn actually makes this feel more bearable as you start to get into each mission. You soon become aware of how the encounters are intended to be approached, but the familiarity with the characters, the speed of their abilities and their own individual differences also lead you to be experimental and more aggressive with how you approach each encounter without significant punishment.

You will die a lot though, and whilst the game does checkpoint somewhat irregularly, you’ll want to be quicksaving very regularly throughout your playthrough. I lost track of the number of times where I would make significant progress, make a silly mistake and lose ten to fifteen minutes of progress simply because I had forgotten to save. The quicksave mapped button is always displayed on the HUD, so you won’t ever have to panic about what to press, but it is somewhat frustrating that the game can be so punishing in lost progress due to a somewhat lacking auto-save/checkpointing system. A minor gripe here too is the order of the menu options upon death. For whatever reason ‘Restart Level’ is the default option and not the reload recent save option. Which meant I very regularly would accidentally restart the entire level when I was just wanting to load my most recent save. This may be a choice to encourage you to slow things down, but it was pretty infuriating in sections where I was having a tough time figuring out the optimal approach to an encounter.

What also may be a case of me not fully understanding the system, the ability differences in characters feels really skewed. For the most part the abilities of different units are unique and make each one feel like they have their specific role in the party. The problem however is that there are a couple that feel like their abilities are far more useful in far more situations than others, and as a result I found myself often using only one or two of the units. Part of my difficulty with some of the stages may be a result of not fully using all the units I had on hand, but I found myself not easily being able to discern where their specific abilities would come in useful. So at times certain characters definitely felt like deadweight.

For the most part, Sumerian Six controls pretty well. Playing with controller, it’s easy to swap between abilities, swap between characters, quicksave and everything is laid out on the hud in an easily readable way. I found the default button mapping for mouse and keyboard a little strange and not entirely logical. The abilities being mapped to ASDF Ctrl and Space. It feels somewhat unintuitive to have the melee attack linked to a button on the keyboard, rather than mouse click, but that may be an issue of unfamiliarity. The camera was easily the thing that I found the most challenging however. Both keyboard and mouse suffer from similar issues.

You’ll want to be able to look around the battlefield and see where all the different units are. In turn you’ll be able to see where there are parts of the environment to help in stealthing past them. The problem however comes from the camera not automatically snapping back to your units. You can press a button to lock the camera onto your unit, but if you move it again, you have to then press it again to recentre. There are also times where no matter which way you turn the camera, because of the high overhead view of the game, you aren’t always able to see exactly where your character is, and in turn if there are things you need to be avoiding. I’m not entirely sure how to fix these issues, as the camera does need to be usable in the way it is to approach the game, but it does feel like it needs some tweaks to feel a little more user friendly. Especially when you need the vision of your character and everything around them from different angles.

Sumerian Six is a solid game. The move to real-time stealth is an interesting one, and one I feel plays well into the wheelhouse of Artificer. Keeping to the over-head view of the tactics style games is an interesting choice, and one that works mostly well. I do wonder if it was a choice of familiarity rather than true understanding, as the camera and gameplay do seem at times at odds with itself. Whilst I am being critical, I cannot reiterate enough how enjoyable the game actually is to play. Especially when you manage to solve a section that has been breaking your brain for a while. The game is fun, in a solid state and innovative. There are just some things I’d like to see tidied up before the full release.

Sumerian Six will release on September 3rd on PC, you can wishlist it on Steam or download the demo for the game.