Sumerian Six – PS5 Review

Sumerian Six from Warsaw-based developer Artificer and publisher Devolver Digital comes to PS5 some eighteen months after its PC release, the console port having been handled by fellow Poles Crunching Koalas.

Artificer previously developed Showgunners, a turn-based tactics game and we have to confess, we thought that Sumerian Six was of a similar ilk. What it’s actually more like is Pyro Studios dormant Commandos series, just with a supernatural pseudoscience angle.

Across its nine levels you’ll unravel the mystery surrounding the plot device of the piece, penned Geiststoff aka ghost substance. Think Indiana Jones without the charismatic lead and you’ll be part of the way there. There’s a similar vibe to Achtung! Cthulhu Tactics in terms of the occultish aspects and the fact that you’re offing Nazis at every turn.

Your primary focus is to do things stealthily as If you go in guns blazing, things will rapidly go south. If you alert an enemy to your presence, you’ll set off alarms of varying duration. You can, however evade them by a variety of means. If they can’t see you, they can’t raise the alarms.

To start with, your first unlocked character Sid can momentarily blind enemies to sneak past them. Handily he can also ride piggyback on patrolling enemies which allows you to bypass big groups of altogether. As you progress through the levels, you’ll bolster your squad with additional members, though some of them aren’t always available at the same time.

This stops you cheesing some levels by abusing some powers a little too liberally, but the added wrinkle of challenges also stops you from using them too much as well. For example, the mad doctor you unlock in the second level has the handy ability to dissolve enemies which handily stops their bodies being seen by patrols. Another ability is the ability to stunlock enemies in place, but the third level has a challenge that prohibits its use.

It’s a little annoying but it means you have to consider other means to make your way through the levels. You can quicksave by tapping the touchbar, it’s prudent to do this fairly frequently lest you die during an encounter and have to retread a lot of ground. Sumerian Six attempts to shame you into not saving too often, but there’s no real penalty on normal difficulty at least. We expect that it’s a factor when you play on the harder difficulties, but we’ve found the challenge more than sufficient on default difficulty.

A significant barrier we found at the outset was the steep learning curve. You’re almost expected to hit the ground running. We guess it’s to encourage replays of the levels to master them at least, but you’ll still have the same toolset and challenge to overcome.

That combined with the biggest problem we had made for tough sledding. You see, the fact this is a PC port brings another problem we’ve encountered with other PS5 versions in the past. There’s not really any concessions made to console players at all. The camera is clearly set up for mouse control and this makes for an unwieldy experience at best. The worst issue we encountered personally was the lack of UI scaling. It’s as bad as the last time we had to mention it a few months back, if not worse.

So bad in fact that the 1080p set that usually suffices when we play at our girlfriends was rendered practically useless when it came to playing. We actually had to bust out our trusty old twenty-one inch Hitachi portable that we used to play Xbox 360 on. Playing on a portable was a concession we didn’t anticipate having to make. We expect matters improve on a 4K set, but not everyone has one these days.

Once we got cracking, we actually started to make some decent progress, our frequent reloads having the added bonus of working on the accumulated kills trophies into the bargain. Each level is a series of environmental puzzles where you have to plot a path through the landscape as well as the enemies within.

We did hit a brick wall on multiple occasions where our progress was impeded, with all our efforts yielding no fruit. We suspect that many other players will have the same experience, particularly if they want to be thorough. It isn’t helped by the fact that line of sight is often your biggest obstacle. You see, if you dispatch an enemy and he’s seen by one of his allies, they’ll generally be alerted. So it’s a case of picking off stragglers one at a time until you’ve only got a few enemies left to deal with.

You can queue up a series of actions if you wish that can help matters somewhat, but you’ll still end up getting stuck. We hope that someone publishes a video walkthrough for the more difficult encounters anyway, as we don’t reckon we’ll progress otherwise. The enemies we’re stuck against are so powerful that we can’t even blast our way out, so we’re potentially glaring down the barrel of a complete level restart if we don’t have a spark of inspiration or tips on how to continue.

In conclusion, Sumerian Six is a solid real time tactical adventure with a mean learning curve. When it clicks its great fun, but when you hit a brick wall you’ll be wondering what the hell you do next. This is somewhat infuriating, put it that way. The UI scaling is another common problem we wish we didn’t have to contend with either. If we struggled, we can only imagine how those with accessibility issues might fare. It’s not great, but typical of PC ports that aren’t best optimised for consoles. It’s still good though, but we shouldn’t need to set up a monitor so we can actually see what’s going on via 1080p.