Sumerian Six review: Inventive and iterative

If you imagine a group of heroes destined to save the world, a bunch of scholars and an unbalanced chemist probably aren’t the first people who spring to mind. Unless you're the folks at Artificer, that is. Artificer used that unorthodox collection of characters to create Sumerian Six, a historical fiction-slash-tactical stealth game that, despite a few too many similarities to other notables in the genre, is one of the year's smartest and most enjoyable strategy games.

Then the Nazis showed up

Artificer is upfront about Sumerian Six’s tone from the beginning, with its comic-book-style opening sequence and characters that quip and banter enough to fill a Marvel film script. These characters are part of a group that tampered with an occult power which they oughtn’t have, and then the Nazi regime got hold of it. Your job is to make sure they don’t use it for Adolf Hitler’s deranged ambitions – and to put to rest as many Nazis as possible in the process. Sumerian Six isn’t a piece of precise historical fiction, but, in addition to Hitler’s actual obsession with the occult, it does touch on a number of real events. Even if it is only a surface treatment of history, it still gives Sumerian Six a welcome bit of extra substance and helps it stand out among the other scores of World War 2 narratives.

In general, it’s the kind of thing you’d get if Indiana Jones went sci-fi, only instead of a single archaeologist, you have a group of highly specialized scholars and a bear whose CVs all feature strong track records in excessive violence. I expected little from the cast after a painful few opening hours where the leads traded empty barbs with each other. Once things get going, however, this bizarre group of heroes develops a warm and often quite funny network of relationships with each other that made them more endearing than I first gave them credit for.

Still, it’s a tactics game before being a narrative experience, and that’s where Artificer excels. It uses most of the genre staples Mimimi Games popularized with Shadow Tactics and Desperadoes 3, from color-coded line-of-sight cones and enemies who raise alarms, to a command mode that pauses time while you direct multiple characters at once. It also makes a point to assure you from the start that it’s not just copying Mimimi’s homework. Character abilities are even more important in Sumerian Six than they are in the likes of Shadow Gambit, and each character has several skills in addition to their basic attack and movement options.

So I pulled out my bag of tricks

The breadth of abilities gives you so many opportunities for getting through every encounter, and they’re fantastically creative. Take Izzy, for example. She can swap places with an enemy and potentially set them up for another character to defeat, put herself on a different level to access a hiding place or useful mechanism, or even get the enemy in range of Sid’s special skill that lets him exist in someone else’s body without them realizing, so he can reach another tricky location or tough foe. Just a single, simple idea spins off half a dozen or more possibilities.

Particular favorites are characters whose skills let you break the usual rules, including the werebear Wojtek and Rosa, a chemist with an unsettling love of poison. One of Wotjek’s skills lets you pounce into a whole group of enemies and demolish them with a few mighty paw swipes, a satisfying burst of action after so much careful sneaking and planning. Rosa can force soldiers and officers away from their posts with a disgusting concoction or inject a brew into a single enemy that makes him explode after a few seconds, taking out anyone nearby. It’s nasty and so rewarding to use effectively. Really, though, every character in Sumerian Six is a blast to play, despite some forced and artificial-feeling limitations – also borrowed from Mimimi – such as one character who can’t jump and another who can’t go through vents. 

Some of the usual genre annoyances are present and unchanged in Sumerian Six, though, and one is slightly worse. Alarms only last 30 seconds before everyone goes back to mostly normal, even if they just stumbled on the dead bodies of three of their compatriots. They remain on high alert for a little while, but routines are otherwise unchanged, even if that means they go back to standing in the middle of an open area with no support. 

The same goes for accidental kills as well. No one’s too bothered to check around when you drop a box on someone or shove a whole plane off a cliff – activities that are very much not normal and routine. They react to the dead body, but then it’s business as usual. Maybe no one liked Jim the Newly Deceased Nazi enough to wonder why he died in exceptionally suspicious circumstances.

And things got out of hand

Guards also seem less reactive in general and often won’t respond to moving objects or noises outside a very small area near them, although they do notice if someone they were speaking with suddenly disappears (or dies). Artificer balances the noise range issue by having some advanced skills make so much noise that it’s impossible not to alert nearby enemies without careful strategy, and superb stage design means you can’t just cheese your best skills and hope everything works out.

I say excellent, though there’s a caveat. A few areas are overly designed around using a specific mechanic, and some – usually the small locations connecting bigger ones or the side areas where you can find skill XP boosts – are just a little dull. The important puzzles and locations stand out much more than a few stinkers, though, and they’re brilliant as much for their physical design as for how Artificer lets you get through them.

Sumerian Six lets you do whatever works in these stages with no penalty. Literally anything goes, as long as the crew gets through alive. Sometimes, that’s the subtle approach the developers probably intended, one that sees you take down an entire room full of Nazi officers without anyone realizing what happened thanks to smart planning. Sometimes, it’s my approach, where everyone sees you because whoops, then they follow you into another room and stay there forever after an entire squad jumps them at once. Those moments where you almost feel like you’re cheating are sublime, and I created them just as often through unorthodox skill use as I did through panicked improvisation. 

That creative freedom and the tools Artificer gives you to work with make it easy to deal with Sumerian Six’s rockier moments and, frankly blatant imitation of games that came before. The team clearly has a strong understanding of how to make the most of the genre's basic tools, and here is where I'd normally say I hope to see even better things from them in the future. With Devolver having laid off half of Artificer's staff earlier in 2024, though, the studio's future seems unclear.

This review is based on a copy of Sumerian Six the publisher provided. Sumerian Six is available now for PC via Steam.

Josh Broadwell

Contributing Editor

Josh is a freelance writer and reporter who specializes in guides, reviews, and whatever else he can convince someone to commission. You may have seen him on NPR, IGN, Polygon, or VG 24/7 or on Twitter, shouting about Trails. When he isn’t working, you’ll likely find him outside with his Belgian Malinois and Australian Shepherd or curled up with an RPG of some description.