18 Tactical games like Metal Gear: Ghost Babel that you should try

The 2016 reboot that rebuilt the series around a handful of enormous sandbox levels — Paris, Sapienza, Marrakesh — designed to be replayed until you know every route, disguise and accident in them. Depth beats quantity here. The frustration is structural: much of the scoring and unlock system requires an online connection in a single-player game, and the trilogy's ownership and content-transfer rules remain a mess.

The game that started the Hitman franchise. The protagonist is a talented yet nameless hitman, known only by his code number 47. He has no past, as he is a clone created by a mad scientist. In the beginning, 47 is being held in a mental hospital, before he escapes to become a killer for hire.

Smersh is Russian for "Death to Spies" and was the name of a set of counterintelligence agencies formed in the Soviet Army during World War II. Their mission was to secure the rear of the active Red Army by arresting traitors, deserters, spies and criminal cells.

Hundreds of very short training challenges stripped from the original Metal Gear Solid — sneak past guards, clear a room, solve a weapon puzzle — set in abstract wireframe rooms with no world attached. It is the pure mechanical core of the game and nothing else. There is no story to speak of, and this PC release is a widely criticised port that many players replace with a community fix.

Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell is a stealth-action game developed by Ubisoft Montreal. It is the first installment of the Splinter Cell franchise. ###Plot In 2003, the United States government formed a new covert agency to gather intelligence. It is a top-secret organization named Third Echelon.

The best-selling Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell® saga takes on an entirely new direction. In the highly anticipated sequel to the 2005 game of the year, Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Double Agent™, play as a double agent spy for the first time ever.

A standalone expansion to Shadow Tactics set in the same Edo-period Japan, with the same real-time squad stealth: pause, plan, and execute several characters' actions at once. If you finished the original and want more, this is exactly that. It is also only three real missions long, reuses maps from the base game, and adds nothing mechanically new.

Hitman 2: Silent Assassin is the second part of the Hitman series, which tells us about the killer clone. The game takes place in 2002-2003. The story begins after the events of Hitman: Codename 47 (the first part of the series).

The high point of the series and arguably of stealth: dynamic light and shadow you read as terrain, a knife, and levels with several genuine routes through them, plus a co-op campaign built for two. Twenty years on it holds up completely. The PC release does not — running it on modern hardware routinely needs community patches, and even then it crashes for many players.

Desperados III is a modern real-time tactics game set in a ruthless Wild West scenario. You take control of a ragtag band becoming a highly functional group of unlikely heroes and heroines.

The game takes place in Japan during the Edo period (early 17th century). The new shogun united Japan after many years of war, but a conspiracy arises against him, the leader of which is hiding under the name Kage-sama. The shogun orders the samurai Mugen to find out who Kage-sama really is.

The first game in the Commandos series. The action takes place during WW2. The player commands a detachment of saboteurs. The game offers twenty missions.