Review

There are now, as far as I'm concerned, two legitimate real-time strategy games. The first being Kohan, and the second being Shogun Total War. A couple of disclaimers before I get going, however: first, when I talk about Shogun, I'm talking about the Warlord Edition of Shogun, which is the original game and the Mongol expansion. Apparently, the original Shogun had its fair share of issues, and the expansion made it the game it was supposed to be. I wouldn't know. I've only played the Warlord Edition, and I recommend you do the same. The second disclaimer is that Shogun isn't a true RTS. In fact, if you look at the stats, you'll see I listed it as simply 'Strategy'. That's because it is more than an RTS. It's like two games in one, really. The first game is a turn-based territorial conquest/economy empire building game, that both plays and looks very Risk-like. The second game is a PAUSEABLE! real-time company-based tactical combat game played out on large, rolling terrain. Both games carry their own weight, and put together they're like chocolate and peanut butter.

Since I'm running significantly behind on reviews, I've decided to try a cliff's notes approach, which I first spelled out in my Hostile Waters review. Here goes:

Good

• Strategy. Real, honest to God Strategy. Made possible, as with Kohan, by the elevation of player control to the level of companies, and away from individual unit control. And that's just the combat game. The territorial game is raw strategy, in good ol' fashioned table-top style.

• Very nice graphics. The lush hills and forests provide a fabulous backdrop to the battles, not to mention bringing extremely important tactical opportunities to the table.

• The voice acting is excellent.

• The documentation is good in an overall sense, even if it does lack detail for the units and is a bit disorganized. There's also a 125 page supplement - "The Way of the Daimyo", which is a treasure trove of historical context.

• The mini-movies that mark certain events are really enjoyable, and short enough that they're tolerable even after multiple viewings.

• The fact that ranged units (archers) have a limited amount of ammunition. This is very cool and adds another layer of strategy.

Bad

• The tutorials leave a bit to be desired. They're rudimentary at best, and don't sufficiently emphasize the importance of the different unit advantages and disadvantages.

• The otherwise excellent graphics are really impaired by the low-resolution textures.

• Irrationally restrictive camera. I'm sure it's for performance reasons. I hope it's for performance reasons, because otherwise... The Myth games had the same issue and it makes me want to chuck it out the window. I can't zoom as far as I want, I can't rotate as much as I want, I can't look the way I want to look. Give me control of the camera dammit!

• Too many unit types. This is a chronic failing of virtually every strategy game, real-time or otherwise. Less is more, people, when are you going to figure that out? Clearly a large part of the fun is in managing/exploiting the advantages and disadvantages of unit match-ups. Chess has six unit types. Shogun has, what, 21? The subtleties of the matchups get shoved aside in favor of generalities and assumptions with that many choices.

• High-ranking soldiers are too difficult to kill. When a single guy is surrounded by 50 samurai, he should die. Quickly.

• No matter how many times you tell off the Portuguese, they keep coming back! And with the same damn message every time. This hampered the immersion, because it's so obviously procedural. I wanted to make my decision to either side with the Christians or not, and then to have to live with that decision.

• No co-op. I've decided I'm just going to knock every game that doesn't have co-op. It's the future of gaming! Mark my words!

Ugly

• The lack of conveniently presented information in the territorial, turn-based game is extremely annoying. There is no good way to tell what facilities are built on any of your occupied territories. You have no recourse but to click on every one of them individually. That's ok in the early game when you've got no more than 3 or 4 territories. In the middle and late game, however, when you've covered 2/3 of the land, and are trying to manage multiple production centers, and trying to coordinate front-lines and supply chains, it just gets maddening. Furthermore, the same goes for being able to tell the geographic nature of the territories (i.e. which ones are can support mining, or farming, or have rivers running through them). This kind of information should be immediately available, without taking you out of the big-picture view. The only way to conduct strategic planning is to have the different pieces of the puzzle laid out in front of you, and with such an inadequate UI, you're forced to keep those puzzle pieces arranged in your head -- for no good reason. The information is there, just show it to me, don't make me click on every damn territory to remind myself that, oh yeah, *that's* the one with good food production.

• The turn-based game is not available in multiplayer. Multiplayer consists solely of the skirmish combat. The argument that this is "technically too hard" is B.S. They didn't do it because they figured most people wouldn't sit through an extended game with multiple turns and multiple battles per turn. That's no excuse for not letting people play the game the way they want to play it. Frankly, I think it'd be really cool, in particular, to be able to spectate on the fights between the other players, if I wasn't fighting myself.

Beautiful

• The presentation and sense of immersion in this game is simply outstanding. You're in feudal Japan, period.

• You can pause and issue commands!!!!!!

• You can pause and issue commands!!!!!!

• You can pause and issue commands!!!!!!

• You can pause and issue commands!!!!!!

• Ok, you get the point. Give me the ability to issue commands while paused and I'd still be playing games like Homeworld and Dungeon Keeper 2.

• The victory music is perfect.

Summary

To wrap up, I'm sold on the Total War recipe. This is a fun game. The turn-based strategy that serves as the backbone for the game is the perfect means of tying together the 3D skirmishes into a campaign that works. It's driven by player decisions, and as a whole makes for an experience that is so much more cohesive than the single-player campaigns usually are for strategy games. It's not scripted or contrived. And it's not just *a* campaign, it's *your* campaign. Shogun is clearly a first pass at the design. I'll be picking up the Medieval sequel in due time, and watching to see how the upcoming Rome installment turns out. On a sad note, when developers tune a design like this over the course of multiple games, there's the chance that the setting you really enjoy the most is the one that got covered early, and is therefore the least playable. I'm not saying that I do or will like the feudal Japan setting more than medieval Europe or Rome, but if I did, I'd be stuck with (likely) the least polished game. The antidote for this is, at least to some degree, to have a moddable game engine, so obsessed fans can use the latest engine to revisit the settings they like.