Twice the Shogun

Creative Assembly revisits the Sengoku period of Japan with Shogun 2: Total War. The game feels like an extension of their previous title Napoleon: Total War with the faster paced movement, morale effects, and some AI elements, but in the end delivers a fresh new Total War game you’d be more than happy to sink your teeth into.

Gameplay

The heavy focus on melee troops will kind of throw you off if you have been playing a lot of Empire/Napoleon, but the same rock/paper/scissors tactics will apply here. Typically there are three types of units you’ll see in a battle. Spear/Sword units who do all of your fighting, Ranged/Archer units for supporting your battle lines, and Cavalry units that can flank and take care of the supporting units behind the front lines. These types of units are then broken down into quality (Ashigaru or Samurai), and unique versions (Matchlock, Cannons, Bow Cav, etc). Combined with a standard set of battle maps to play on and plenty of castle sieging, things will start to look and feel the same after your initial play through of a short campaign.

Sieging in this game is also handled differently. Do you know how Japanese people got past a Castle’s walls in the 16th century? Ladders? No. Grappling Hooks? Nope. Siege Towers? Uh-uh. They scaled the walls with their bare hands and climbed that shit like a man. All units are able to scale the walls. Troop disposition and location of attack is more important here since your men will suffer casualties getting to the wall (archers), climbing up the wall (falling off), and then fighting garrisoned forces inside. Burning down a door presents a more direct way of getting inside, but also a nasty choke point for the defenders to trap you in. Also, Castles can be upgraded to provide more tiers of walls to go through, elevation changes, little moats with a handful of places to ford across and Towers to help fend off attackers.

Castle Sieging brings out a fault of this game early on, since there’s only one battle map per Castle tier. So if you fight a Tier 1 castle in one province and then go next door and siege another Tier 1 castle, they will look exactly the same. Standard battle maps are also limited in selection and you will start to recognize them early on. This is kind of disappointing since this has been an issue in the past games. You think they would introduce some sort of map generator/randomizer by now.

Elevation plays more of a factor now since units charging uphill not only move slower, but suffer a penalty to attack doing so. This means battles are mostly focused around or on top of a defensible hill. Shock units (units with a high charge value) are also more effective in this game, able to decimate and route units within seconds in some situations. Battles play out faster so you’ll have to adjust your lines quickly and use your General frequently to provide morale boosts. Babysitting troops will make it hard to watch the awesome new highly detailed units and brutal fighting animations.

The naval stuff isn’t as good as the old Empire or Napoleon ship battles, mostly because you’ll be fighting with arrows. Essentially, there are boarding ships with a greater amount of Samurai to board with, Ranged/support boats with faster ships, and unique gunpowder ships that toss grenades and mines. There are a few canon ships in the game and the dreaded “Black Ship” with 60 cannons but it’s mostly just alot of boarding and surrendering, nothing very explosive like a proper 18th century ship battle. Not exactly a fault of the game, just the time period.

Graphics

Speaking of which, the graphics engine is reminiscent of Napoleon: Total War. There are prettier fire and smoke effects, but the big push was made in the detailed units and fighting animations. You can see units intricate armor and weapons they’re equipped with. The fighting animations are exciting to watch (alot of dudes get stabbed through the face). The lighting and shadows are done very well and weather effects do not look cheesy. There are alot of fog effects and clouds sailing through the skies which adds a nice atmosphere to the setting.

The 3D Campaign map with a moveable camera is a welcome addition, but not necessarily needed or useful. Using it just makes me lose orientation of the map, so I hardly bothered rotating the map at all. It was only useful selecting some troops hidden behind some one else’s flag.

Multiplayer

A heavy focus was put into multiplayer for this game as there are plenty of features to choose from, a customizeable and persistent character you can level up with, and best of all, a Co-op Campaign mode! The latter is fully featured and plays out like you would expect, essentially a single player coop with another person. The battles can be fought between you and your partner, you can gift him units on the battlefield to control or if he is the reinforcing army, he will take control of his own forces. There is an adversial campaign mode as well. I experienced a steady flow of glitches and bugs during an online coop relating to the campaign map and not being able to finish my turn, and also not being able to join a coop game at all. I hope that these will eventually get ironed out.

AI

The AI have been improved some since the last Total War game, but you'll still witness the random cavalry unit charge all by itself straight into your lines, awkward unit placement, and little focus on out manuevering your lines or flanking period. I was happy to see that the AI can form proper battle lines for the most part and it is also able to determine the best defensible hill to perch upon. You'll be glad to hear that the General doesn't charge into certain death as much as he used to, but he'll dismount and siege a castle's walls if he is the last unit left for some reason. I guess honor before death right? With that said, the AI has made some noticeable improvements but not all is perfect. Although having the option to have Drop-in battles is nice, it's just an excuse for poor AI to be present in the game. It would be nice to have an AI that would try and flank you every once in awhile.

As far as the Campaign Map goes, the AI does a decent job there as well. Allies are involved more when attacking an enemy, the AI does a good job on moving armies together for support, and also not sending in smaller sized armies to attack you. On the higher difficulty settings there is some noticeable cheating going on with the AI being able to afford lots of Armies even with only a few provinces.

Shogun 2 is a solid release for the franchise, no game breaking bugs, a nice change up in the style of gameplay, and a different setting besides war torn America and Eurasia to fight in. I'm glad they chose to revisit Shogun and implement what they have learned as well as new technology into it. If you're looking for a new Grand Strategy game, give this one a try. And if you're already a Total War fan, why are you reading this instead of conquering Japan?

Did I leave the stove on again?...oh dear

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