Shogun 2 Review

The original Shogun, which I fondly reviewed, was my first game on my first personal PC back when I was at university. Yes, I had an Amiga and Championship Manager and the like, but Shogun was my first experience of a game that pushed up the bar of my expectations beyond the bunny-hopping graphics of the Amiga. Having played, on and off, the entire Total War series, I was seriously looking forward to this incarnation. And yet I was dismayed.



You may, like me, have installed the demo expecting great things. A lack of graphic options was naff. Four frames per second was unplayable. The damn game simply did not work. And the smoothness of MTW2 made it a better game.

Resolved to give Shogun 2 a miss, I ignored it for several months. Then browsing the PCGamer forums, I saw that it had been reduced on amazon to a mere £15. Buying it on a whim, I revealed my bargain to the community only to commit forum seppuku by hearing that, the same day, it had been reduced to £12. I never did like the economy aspects of such games.

Still, purchasing it a while later had the advantage of a working patch that made the game actually work. My experience with CoD Black Ops meant that I was already prepared to install the game from the disks (unless you fancy a 17gig bandwith hit.) The patch itself was at least 3 gig.

When the game finally loaded my patience was well-rewarded. The opening movie is one that I have yet to skip; it is incredibly well-made and evokes the spirit of game every time I have seen it (so far.) And the game itself plays very differently to previous issues of the TW series.

For a start, the unit tweaks make the game more of a tactical masterclass. Archers in previous incarnation can exhaust their ammunition and decimate an average unit from, say, 60 to 20 or so. In this version, even the weakest archers be expected to rout enemy units with half their ammunition. A welcome change. In addition, cavalry truly feel powerful. In the original Shogun, I never took heavy cavalry. They simply weren’t as useful as their Yari counterparts. In Shogun 2, however, a unit of heavy cavalry can decimate a peasant archer unit entirely within 10-15 seconds. This is the Mongol expansion all over again. Brilliant!

The campaign mode always see me play as the green Shimazu, rolling across the entirety of the campaign map from left to right. I initially set the game to its default options which, unfortunately, left me with incredibly small units sizes (15 in a cavalry units rather than 60, for example.) However, I needn’t have worried on my first play through. Many of the battles are sieges. Yet siege battles, although irksome to me, play very differently as all students can scale any wall. A pleasing addition.

The final aspect of the game which makes this a vastly improved TW game is the collision detection. Having copious played MTW2, I am well-used to hitting the ‘r’ key to ensure my damn army actually runs to where its meant to, I am yet to get used to that collision detection actually works in Shogun 2. While in MTW2 I simply accepted that soldiers would charge to within feet of the enemy before stopping, Shogun has happily solved this problem.

That is, in itself, a rather nice metaphor upon which to end this impressionistic review. This game is a step forward by the best developer in the RTS business over the past ten years. For producing a game that I can pick up and play midweek, I thank them. It’s just a shame that the option screen contains so much animation that it sometimes burns out my graphics card...