63 Days (Xbox Series) Review

63 Days is a modernised but traditional take on Commandos, and it should appeal to anyone who enjoys that particular brand of methodical, save-scum-abusing gameplay. Each chapter offers a massive map with a seemingly impenetrable mass of enemies and overlapping vision cones, until you find a chink in their defences, pick off some isolated stragglers, and slowly turn the tide in your favour as Nazi corpses start piling up in bushes and outbuildings. It’s scratched an itch I’ve not felt since gaming primarily on PC in the early 2000’s, yet despite the PC-centric structure and unforgiving challenge, the console port looks good, runs well, and it plays fine with a gamepad about 75% of the time. The problem is that other 25% and how compounds other issues.

63 Days is set in 1944, towards the end of WWII, and it uses events of the failed Warsaw Uprising as inspiration for it’s fictional cast. A period when Russian forces were approaching Nazi-occupied Warsaw, remnants of the Polish Army and local resistance fighters exploited the chaos, but were ultimately abandoned by both Allied and Soviet leadership.

The premise and story are intriguing at first; however, the stolen childhood/revenge narrative is, by design, empowering and the tone is all over the place. It glosses over much of the horror thanks to the distant isometric perspective, brief references to purge of the Warsaw Jewish Ghetto and retaliation killings against civilians, and the in-game set pieces have little interest in the fate of anyone outside of its action-movie cast with often goofy dialogue – though I’ll accept some of that might be down to the English translation and voice work.

Two young brothers take the leading role, patriotic yet constantly sparring as siblings do, with three more resistance fighters – some of them actual children – introduced over subsequent chapters. Each has their own reason for fighting and unique but complementary skills that will be familiar to fans of the genre. There are lightly animated cutscenes, in-game set pieces, and plenty of banter, but the story is mostly just context for the missions, with most cutscenes serving as glorified briefings that give you the lay of the land and a few potential routes to get you started.

What follows is carefully observing dense maps packed with objectives, fortifications, and hiding spots; avoiding the vision cones of watchtowers, stationary guards, and patrols; and spending literal hours methodically planning, saving, experimenting, dying, reloading, and trying again until you finally carve a corpse-ridden path to your goal.

Even on its lowest difficulty setting, 63 Days is never a fast-paced game. Your heroes die swiftly in a hail of bullets and every mission has at least one primary or optional objective that forces you to be stealthy or, at the very least, disable alarms before going loud. It starts simple as you avoid vision cones, move slowly to minimise noise ripples, choke out isolated guards, and hide their bodies, but soon you’ll need to use multiple heroes and skills in tandem, often with perfect timing.

That might mean distracting or luring guards while in disguise, while the others crawl up to simultaneously kill them; or it could mean doing that and desperately hiding the bodies within a tight time frame between patrols. It’s a game full of tense moments, especially when your team is separated while infiltrating an area through different points, but there are still plenty gameplay contrivances to keep you moving forward.

In addition to shameless save-scumming, guards don’t check in with one another over radio or notice disappearing patrols; explosions and gunshots have an unrealistically small sound radius; while bushes, trucks, and outbuildings can hide an infinite number of corpses. If guards do find a body, they’ll alert others and commence a thorough search – including nearby hiding spots – but eventually return to their original posts or patrols. Time slows when you open radial menus to select a hero, skill, or target; a planning mode also slows time and allows you to queue up one action for each hero to enact simultaneously; and there’s a run-and-gun feature lets you control one character in twin-stick shooter fashion while your companions attempt to move and fire on the same target – sometimes.

It’s never a slick and fluid as Mimimi Games’ Shadow Tactics or Shadow Gambit, but as in the classic Commando games, you can go loud if the mission allows it – but it’s much, much harder to survive in 63 Days if large groups converge on your position. Only some heroes can wield firearms, gunfire is often inaccurate, there no overwatch mechanic, and the loose twin-stick controls and companion AI can feel woefully inadequate. It works well enough during a few set pieces or when you’re left with stragglers, but systematic stealth killing is the way to go.

One thing I couldn’t test during the review period was online co-op, something I imagine could be thrilling – if you have a dedicated online friend with the time and patience to thrash out plans and methodically hunt Nazis together. That said, even if you’re just here for the single-player content, fans of the genre playing on PC, with a mouse and keyboard, should find plenty to enjoy in 63 Days if you can forgive rare path-finding disasters and sometimes suicidal NPCs.

If you plan to pick this up on console; however, there are control issues that turn a challenging game into a potentially frustrating one. 63 Days offers a stiff challenge by default and severely punishes a single mistake. When you combine that design with a dense control scheme and imprecise cursor, it’s far too easy to issue suicidal movement orders, struggle to select the right target in a cluster of enemies, or simply push the wrong button and realise your last save was several painstaking minutes back. Given the console space is not exactly flush with tactical stealth games, I’d still recommend it – just go in prepared to stomach some control issues.

63 Days was reviewed on Xbox Series S|X using a code provided to gameblur by the publisher. It is also available on PC, Xbox One, and PS4/5.