Game intel
Sumerian Six
Lead an unlikely team of commando scientists behind enemy lines to fight Nazis, uncover arcane mysteries, and wield experimental technology to turn the tide of…
The first 30 minutes I spent with Sumerian Six on PS5 were honestly rougher than I expected. On paper it’s exactly my thing: real-time stealth tactics in the vein of Commandos and Shadow Tactics, but dropped into an alternate World War II where Nazi occult projects and full-on Lovecraftian horrors are just… normal Tuesday problems.
You control the Enigma Squad, six scientists turned commandos, each with weird supernatural tricks and gadgets. The structure will feel immediately familiar to anyone who’s lived inside these games: isometric maps, vision cones, alarms, bodies to hide, painstakingly choreographed takedowns where one wrong click (or in this case, button press) turns your masterpiece into a farce.
I went in with roughly twenty years of mouse-and-keyboard muscle memory from this subgenre, so I was curious and a bit nervous about the controller port. And my first mission with Sid, the first squad member you meet, had me genuinely worried. Camera fighting me. Abilities feeling awkward. That slow, creeping dread that this was one of those “PC game awkwardly crammed onto a pad” situations.
What I didn’t know yet is that one almost hidden camera option, buried near the bottom of the menu, would basically flip the experience from “ugh, shame” to “oh, this actually rules.” But I’ll get to that twist in a second.
Before talking controls, it’s worth getting a feel for what Sumerian Six is actually doing moment-to-moment. This isn’t a big open-ended sandbox like some immersive sim; it’s closer to a puzzle-box where every soldier, occult contraption, and patrol route is part of a designed solution.
Across its 10 chapters (each broken into several chunky missions), you gradually unlock the full squad. They’re not generic “sniper / infiltrator / heavy” archetypes either; they’re oddballs. You’ve got experimental tech, ritual powers, and reality-bending tools that let you do things classic Commandos never could. It still plays by the expected rules – stay out of cones, lure guards, abuse line of sight – but the occult twist gives you fresh problems and solutions rather than just feeling like WWII re-skinned for the hundredth time.
The pacing is what pulled me in. Missions are long enough to feel meaningful, but not so bloated that a failed attempt 20 minutes in makes you want to uninstall the game. Once you accept that save scumming isn’t just allowed, it’s practically the intended tempo, the rhythm becomes really satisfying: push forward a little, quick save, try a crazy maneuver, reload when it inevitably goes wrong, then nail it the second or third time.
On PS5, that rhythm rises or falls on how the camera and controls feel. And that’s where my relationship with the game did a complete 180.
With the default camera mode, my first evening was a chore. The game offers two basic behaviors right away:
That might sound fine on paper, but in practice with a controller it felt… wrong. I’d be lining up Sid to use his toolkit, try to adjust the viewing angle at the same time, and instantly feel like my hands were two steps behind my brain. Every small adjustment required either switching modes or tolerating an angle that didn’t show what I needed.
By the end of that first mission, I was doing that thing where you blame yourself – “maybe I just need to re-learn how these console tactics games play”. The worst part? The rest of the control scheme is actually pretty thoughtful: walking versus running is nicely analog on the left stick, the ability wheel makes sense once you learn where everything lives, and hot-swapping between characters never felt like a fight.
But if you can’t comfortably see what you’re doing, none of that matters. I genuinely considered putting the game down for a bit. Then, the next night, I hopped into the options menu out of sheer stubbornness — and found the thing that changed everything.
Burying the lede here feels appropriate, because the game itself does it. Scroll down far enough in the control options and you’ll find an alternative camera mode with a name that doesn’t scream “this will fix the game for pad users.” But the description does:
Flip it on, load a mission, and suddenly:
It sounds small, but it’s the difference between steering a tank and steering a car. With this setting turned on, everything finally clicked. I replayed those first missions and sections that had felt like mud suddenly became smooth enough that I could focus on the puzzle, not on wrestling the viewpoint.
This is the camera mode that should’ve been the default for PS5. Full stop. With it, Sumerian Six goes from “promising but clumsy port” to “yeah, this actually stands shoulder to shoulder with the better controller-focused tactics games.” Without it, you’re constantly aware that the game was born on PC.
I genuinely don’t understand why the alternative mode is hidden so low in the menu or why the naming isn’t more obvious. It’s not some hardcore option; it’s the one that most closely replicates the feel of mouse look within the constraints of a pad. If you pick up the PS5 version, do yourself a favor: go into options and flip that camera setting before you even start the tutorial.
Once the camera issue was solved, the rest of the control scheme started to shine through. Sumerian Six is unforgiving in that classic Commandos way: patrol patterns overlap, enemy sight lines are brutal, and a single misstep can chain-react into an alarm, reinforcements, and a full wipe within seconds.
The game leans into this by making quick save and quick load absolutely painless on PS5. Quick save is mapped to a press of the DualSense touchpad, and it becomes a reflex. Clear one guard? Tap. Sneak past a patrol? Tap. About to try something ambitious with three characters moving in sync? Tap, of course.
There was one particular early mission where this system literally saved my sanity. I’d knocked out a guard near a stairway, wanting to drag the body somewhere safe before climbing back up. But because of the context-sensitive X button, the game kept prioritizing “pick up body” over “use stairs.” The result was this farcical little dance: enemies creeping closer, me frantically mashing X and watching my poor agent repeatedly hoist and drop the same corpse instead of fleeing.
From the outside it’s funny; in the moment it’s pure frustration. And it highlights one of the few real design snags of the PS5 version: contextual actions sometimes lean the wrong way. In most missions it’s a minor annoyance, but when it happens at the climax of a carefully orchestrated plan, you feel every wrong input.
Still, with fast saves and loads, the game never tips into unfair. You just sigh, reload, reposition the body first this time, and mentally add “watch the action prompts” to your personal checklist.
What really kept me pushing through repeated failures was the squad’s toolkit. Coming from Shadow Tactics and Desperados III, there’s definitely a bit of that Mimimi DNA here: levels feel like they’re begging you to line up clever ability chains, and each character has a very clear niche.
On controller, the way you trigger those abilities is mostly smart. There’s a learning curve in the first couple of hours as you internalize which face button does what when combined with triggers, but once it lands, swapping powers mid-movement feels surprisingly natural. The only sore spot is some of the auto-aim and auto-selection logic. In an effort to be “helpful” for newcomers, the game sometimes snaps to targets or positions in a way that feels overprotective if you’re already used to this genre.
I’d occasionally try to fine-tune a throw or a power placement and feel like the game was second-guessing me, locking onto what it thought was obvious. It never ruined a mission outright, but it did make certain advanced maneuvers feel less crisp than they could be on a mouse.
That said, as someone who still misses Mimimi Games a lot, there was a real pleasure in feeling a studio like Artificer carry the torch on console with this much respect for the subgenre’s complexity. This isn’t a watered-down, “for gamepads” version of stealth tactics. It’s the full-fat thing with a slightly fussy layer of controller logic wrapped around it — one that thankfully becomes mostly transparent once you flip the right camera toggle and put in a bit of time.
Technically, the PS5 version is in a good place. Sumerian Six was never a GPU-melting monster on PC, and that works in its favor here. On my setup the game ran at a solid 60 FPS from start to finish, whether I was in dense indoor occult labs or wide exterior compounds crawling with enemies.
HDR support is where the visuals really benefited on my TV. This isn’t a photorealistic showcase, but the art direction leans into colour and contrast in a way that HDR sells nicely: warm, sickly light from occult machinery, deep blues in night-time infiltration zones, and a surprisingly vibrant palette even in the darker horror-tinged areas. It’s stylish more than technically flashy, and that’s enough for this genre.
The environments and characters have been brought over basically 1:1 from PC, which means crisp silhouettes and clear visual readability. That might sound boring next to big-budget cinematic games, but for stealth tactics it’s exactly what you want: no confusion about who’s where, what’s interactable, and where danger is coming from.
I didn’t run into notable bugs, visual glitches, or performance dips during my time on PS5. Loads are short enough that dying repeatedly never becomes an extra punishment. There are also a few small PS5-specific flourishes — like radio chatter coming through the DualSense speaker — that don’t change the game, but do add a bit of texture to the experience.
After a good chunk of hours with the PS5 version, it’s clear this isn’t meant to convert people who already bounced off Commandos-style games. Sumerian Six is still:
If that sends a pleasant little shiver of nostalgia down your spine, the PS5 port does right by you — but only if you’re willing to poke around the settings and spend a couple hours letting the pad layout sink in.
If you’re coming in totally new to this subgenre, the console version is actually a fairly welcoming starting point as long as you approach it as a slow-burn, thinky experience rather than something you’ll brute-force with reflexes. The price point is reasonable for the 15-20 hours the campaign can take, especially if you like chasing cleaner runs and experimenting with different squad approaches.
By the time I rolled credits on Sumerian Six on PS5, I’d gone through a full emotional arc with it. First impression: “oh no, they’ve mangled another PC tactics gem on console.” Middle stretch: “hang on, this is actually really clever.” Final feeling: “okay, this sits comfortably near the top of the stealth tactics pile on PlayStation, with a couple caveats.”
The core game — occult WWII setup, inventive squad abilities, tightly designed missions — is strong regardless of platform. What the PS5 version adds is solid performance, nice HDR presentation, and a controller scheme that absolutely works once you flip that lifesaving camera setting. It’s not perfect: contextual actions can be annoying, auto-aim can feel a bit overbearing for veterans, and the learning curve will scare away anyone expecting a casual tactics romp.
But if you’ve been mourning the lack of proper Commandos-style games on your console since Mimimi bowed out, Sumerian Six feels like a small miracle. It respects your time, your patience, and your desire to plan ridiculous multi-character takedowns that leave entire Nazi outposts looking like they were hit by a very precise, very smug ghost.
Score: 8/10 – Excellent stealth tactics on PS5, provided you aren’t afraid of menus and you embrace the sacred art of the quick save.
Get access to exclusive strategies, hidden tips, and pro-level insights that we don't share publicly.
Ultimate Reviews Strategy Guide + Weekly Pro Tips