PC (Microsoft Windows)2025

Shadowveil: Legend of The Five Rings

Recruit and command a party of samurai on expeditions into the Shadowlands of the Legend of the Five Rings universe. Gain experience and cards in battle to develop units and create powerful combat combinations in this strategic roguelite.

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Screenshots

Mostly Positive

4 Steam reviews

Review History

Reviews

4 total

≥h

Steam User 0714STEAMRecommended

Норм, но достаточно однообразно, через 6 часов возвращаться не хочется.

Feb 28, 2026·6h·Verified

Steam User 4609STEAMNot recommended

Oh, this is a bad game lmao.

The art and music are fine. The sound effects are a little weird and intrusive---lots of crispy crackly and little pings at odd times, fully apart from the traditional instruments in the soundtrack. The writing is okay, although dragged down by the supremely mid voice directing. But none of these are the actual problem with Shadowveil, because Shadowveil is both boring and grindy.

And by grindy, I don't mean in a fun brain off way. I mean I spent two hours retrying the first mission and that is a standard gameplay experience.

Shadowveil is a dumb as rocks autobattler that feels like it was designed to be a gacha, then awkwardly pivoted into single player on the way out the door. You drop some units on the field, they run at and rng swing on the nearest enemy mob, often they find the most innovative ways to pathfind into death zones and spots where they can be useless. You can speed up combat, but there's still lots of little waits built into the UI which sucks because these would be fine in a more deliberate and reflective game but here you just wanna grind five hundred goblins to see if you can finally get past the starting boss.

The game also does a miserable job communicating this. The UI is stiff and the tooltips you kind of have to coax into popping up. It feels buggy, even if they mostly got rid of the last wave of bugs in their "I'm done with this game forever" patch. Shadowveil does not tell you that you need to sandbag a bunch of runs to get your two supporting characters levelled, nor do most substats and values that you need to calculate actually have an explanation for what they do. Energy does.. something. It's probably important, but Shadowveil shuts up when you ask. Progression is slow and meager and you can screw it up, and this isn't even getting into the basebuilding.

In regular roguelites, you get some currency to build your base between runs. But Shadowveil REALLY wants you to clear the first chapter before it'll let you touch any of that, and in order to clear the first chapter you have to sandbag for over two hours.

I think there's a playable jankslop title under all of this, but it's just not worth the effort to monotonously grind a game that doesn't feel fun to play and isn't offering any hope that it'll get better.

Just play Mahokenshi. It's the same type of thing but you can schmoove, it's tutorialized well, and it's actually fun to play.

Edit: Oh, you can super brick yourself in a lot of easy to miss ways. Such as, if you spend political capital on an upgrade, you lock yourself out of getting any more political capital ever (pending a very rare rng drop). I'm assuming there are issues like this in the game because the playtesters kept screaming and climbing out of the building rather than be forced to play it.

Feb 25, 2026·2h·Verified

Steam User 2775STEAMRecommended

Good.

Feb 22, 2026·44h·Verified

Steam User 5571STEAMRecommended

Entertaining game. The only frustrating thing is that - due to the plotline - you end up "falling back" at the end of a run even if you've built an unstoppable fortress that the final boss can't even damage let alone kill. At some point if you're overkilling the boss, it'd be great for it to say "you know what, actually you *are* stronger than this oni. Finish the poor bastard off."

I recognize that this is infeasible due to the nature of the plot, but I would get very disappointed when I'd have an amazing run and it ended with my invincible army deciding to fall back despite being uninjured.

Feb 19, 2026·22h·Verified