Shogun 2 - Total War - Review

Verdict - Not so impressed.
Score - 3 out of 5

Shogun 2 - Total War teases, but does not have the potential to be right up there with Empire Total War or even Napoleon Total War. The game looks like it is built on the same engine as Napoleon with just a few minor tweaks like camera and lighting changes.

The campagn map is nothing new. You start out as one of the warring factions in Japan and build stuff, raise armies and go conquer provinces. The buildings and resources available are very familiar to the previous editions. The change here is that you get to manage all the buildings in a province by just accessing the city info panel. The objective of the game is to capture the Shogunate and other certain provinces as per your faction, and hold them for a year.

What I did not like right at the outset is how there is no way of researching technologies in parallel. No more multiple schools and universities, you have to get to do with researching the slow, tedious, one pip per turn way. I was not impressed with the technologies on offer as well. There are plenty to research terms of military, but there wasn't anything good to build your economy at the offset. Diplomacy has much more weightage here, with plenty of factions to trade with and keep you occupied. But the problem arises once you have conquered a substantial number of provinces and move towards the shogunate. Things immediately get difficult with all factions turning against you (normal difficulty). Diplomacy goes right out the window, never mind if you have been trading with them for years and never mind that your Daimyo's daughter is married to their general.

Battlefield warfare is very similar to the previous installments. The AI does do things differently with its cavalry and try to outflank you, but that gets old very soon if you are careful. Castle defence gets some refreshing changes like towers that fire arrows and ramparts which are excellent for archers. However, with no large siege weapons till much later in the game, it usually comes down to how many and how good your archers are. There is no occupying buildings, which is again a let down. You get all these towering castles within the fort, but can't fight from within them.

Sea warfare is a bit of a let-down, in my opinion. But then, after those epic batttles I played with Napoleon's 300 gun ships-of-the-line, these slow, ugly arrow boat fights pale very much. In fact, the lack of any kind of gun-powder units in substantial numbers kind of make all the battles boring (of course, that's just me).

Considering the fact that they had time, I would have expected a proper campaign, like Napoleon's or like the USA campaign in Empire Total War. All you do is select a faction and each time, the objective is to capture the shogunate. Also, the campaign map is just too small, it gets tedious looking at the same map of the Japanese mainland and the few small islands around. What would have been awesome is if they could have added a campaign in which Japan invades North Korea, like they did in 1592. That war happened in the same time period as the game is set and it would have provided an expansive map, not to mention the added incentive of fighting the Chinese (who aided North Korea). Ah well, here's hoping for an expansion pack perhaps.