FYI many of you should be playing
Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun (
not currently on sale), because it's great. It's a real-time stealth tactics game (unlike Total War, not pauseable) where you control a team of elite operatives in samurai-era Japan and undertake a wide variety of missions (stealing things, assassinating people, fighting in battles, breaking out of jail, etc.). I never played it, but I see a lot of comparisons to the classic Commandos series. Anyways, it's extremely fun; the difficulty is quite hard, but there's a very flexible save/reload system that you are positively encouraged to use so you don't feel bad about it. The levels are varied, and some of them have interesting gimmicks (for example, in snow levels you leave footprints that guards will notice if they see them before they fade). The five characters you control are all distinctive, useful and flexible, and the levels are generally extremely open, with lots of different paths to the objective. Controlling all of your characters when you can't pause is part of the challenge, but there's a limited scheduling mechanic that allows you to queue up one action per character to be executed with a button press. It's inordinately satisfying to take out a group of overlapping guards by distracting one guy, then sending everyone else simultaneously from their carefully chosen hiding places to wipe out the rest of the group and drag their bodies to hiding before the distracted guy turns around. There's also lots of achievements, speedruns, hardcore modes, etc. for people who are into that kind of stuff. The story is nothing special, but it's well done and the voice-acting is fantastic. Highly recommended!