Shogun: Total War 2 demo is out.

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I'm incredibly disappointed.

Score: 3/10


Review:

The interface for this game on both the campaign map and the tactical combat map is worse than Shogun 1's. Its visually counter-intuitive (complicated drawings representing basic button functions) and bulky (HUGE buttons). Design-wise its a disaster.

Graphics:

We'd expect better graphics than Empire Total War/Napoleon or at least similar to. Nope. Apparently CA took shogun 1's graphics and prettied them up a bit but the overall graphics are sub-par. Seems like a game made 5 years ago.

There is one good thing about the new graphics though: the terrain does look pretty good and is well designed. Tactical maps are bigger in size and complexity.. the hills and elevation are easily visible when compared to the Age of Sail era Total War games.

Gameplay:

Campaign map: bleagh. Same crap as Shogun 1 with a couple of new options sprinkled on it:

Ninja units can now assassinate and sabotage an army. Assassinations are like shogun 1 in effect.. deprives the army of the general bonuses..and sabotage can cause some casualties (poisoning food) and it cuts the army's movement range by half next turn. Against buildings ninja can sabotage industrial units or sabotage castle gates for 1 turn (so they're open the turn you attack).

Tactical Map:

Castles sieges are now incredibly good..almost like Medieval and Rome. Multi-stage castle assaults.

AI formation and AI behavior is still as crappy as before. CA apparently has not devoted any resources to developing a new battle AI. Let's just say the old '5 horse deep cavalry charge is stopped in its tracks by a 2 rank deep unit of foot that doesnt use spears' issue is still there. Units still walk over each other and there is still no means to move an entire army using a custom formation with one click with it retaining its custom formation.

CA has borrowed the 'buffer' concept from MMO's and generals now have the ability to 'buff' unit morale,attack,def, etc while in the field. While it helps the game it really only turns it into a rather bad battle system. They shouldve really just added the 'rally' option to regroup routing units and reinforce morale of units the general is close to.

In the end, I was expecting so, so much more from CA with this Shogun remake... but apparently all they really did was patch & update shogun 1, sprinkled it with a couple new features and now sell it and promo it as if it was a completely new product.

Don't bother buying this game until a couple of years from now when the mod community fixes the game for CA ... like they always do.

Swedish PC Gamer gave the full game 91/100 in next month's copy (which I for some reason recieved today). Just sayin'.

Tactical battle graphics look equal to Napoleon for individual soldiers and superior in terms of the number of soldiers present and the intensity of the fighting. There is absolutely no resemblance to Shogun 1's graphics engine (pseudo 3d bitmapped ranks of identical soldiers) beyond they're both set in Japan.

Perhaps we should wait til the full game is released. Besides, don't most of us play multiplayer anyways?

No.

Oh. Then uhh. Carry on...

If it does what it says on the advert, this will be the first TW game with a multi-player option. It'll be interesting to see how it works.

Uhm.. it's not the first multiplayer TW game.

Didn't all the TW games have multiplayer? Napoleon has "Multiplayer Campaign" which I assume is co-op.

It would be the first TW game that is multiplayer in the campaign map.. previous games only allowed custom battles.

Ambivalence:

Aside from the graphics being high res they arent that different from shogun 1 ..really. Its hard to explain but when you compare the soldiers and detail level its really no big difference.

The really big problem is with the combat AI. You would think that after a decade of making these games CA would at least attempt to make a better one. For example the battle AI used in Mount and Blade Warband.. a game that really does not use formations per say but which people have modded formations into it... does a much better job at depicting how individual troops behave in a group.

In total war they just stand in formation and let themselves get killed. In M&B the formation tends to scatter a bit while they fight and while they are taking missile fire. When a formation is struck by cavalry charge in M&B the formation is shredded as the horses trample thin lines.. in TW the entire formation just stops because the first horse in the wedge formation didnt cut through a 3 man deep formation. Just plain silly stupid things like that ruin a game completely.

Eee, my bad, didn't realise it was in Napoleon. Heh. And me one of the few people as seems to prefer Napoleon over Empire, and all.

@Technicalpacifist, they didn't call it "Total War" just because they thought it sounded good; it has a specific meaning, and that's "war, using every means at your disposal" - in other words, your whole population, industrial base, technology, diplomacy, espionage, and so on, the full campaign. The only multi-player option has been to play isolated tactical battles, which are by definition not total war.

@Dantac - I really don't see what you're getting at about the graphics. If I remember right Shogun 1 and its immediate sequels, Medieval 1 and its immediate sequels used a pseudo 3d engine, Rome moved to a proper 3d engine but with low detail and no variation among units and Medieval 2 onwards use a proper 3d engine with individual variation; the difference between Shogun 2 and Shogun 1 is immense. You look at a unit in Shogun 2, you see a group of individuals wearing uniform; in Shogun 1, at least as I remember it, you see a bunch of identical sprites at funny angles to each other. Also, though I haven't played enough to really check it out, I understand they've upped the unit headcount a lot, so that a battle may actually have a realistic number of combatants. Will have to see how that's been implemented 'cause AIUI battles in the Sengoku Jidai were pretty big. TW series up to now have usually been "welcome to Cannae / Waterloo / Wherever, population 2,000..." even when the engine could handle more. I'd say the problem with the TW engine (and every other large scale RTS/RTT I've seen) is that soldiers are always divided into visible units that don't merge together properly - you don't get a single line of men, you get a line of little blocks of men. Think that's maybe what you're getting at.

I do agree completely about the lack of development of combat AI in general through the series. I think they've focussed far more heavily on the graphics than anything else. *shrugs* Haven't seen modded formations in Warband but the default ones can be very silly. However, spear infantry are grossly underpowered in vanilla Warband, where spears generally don't stop cavalry charges... nothing much beats heavy cavalry in Warband, but proper horses ain't stupid and won't impale themselves on sharp sticks (or bayonets.) Heavy cavalry at least in Europe were a shock weapon, not one to send against prepared infantry... I confess I don't know much about feudal Japan but I'd be surprised if horsemen there would fare any better in a straight charge against a wall of bamboo spears. So... yeah, I'm not impressed by the TW AI, but I wouldn't want to see it turn into an M&B style "my 100 Swadian Knights against your 100 Mamlukes and nothing else gets a look-in" thing, 'cause heavy cavalry shouldn't dominate infantry unless they're already in trouble or they catch them by surprise.

Heh. Well, I pre-ordered the game anyway, so as far as they're concerned they've already got this mug's money.

@Dantac

You probably meant that Shogun 2 Multiplayer campaign can support past +2 people. Clan Warfare I think?

Empire was the last time CA burn me.

I'll pirate this game if decent mods come out for it. I'm not given them a single penny till they invest in providing a challenging AI opponent. I realise AI is difficult to create and the skills of doing so are few and far between but if you are going to make a game primarily intended for solo play and you don't put a credible AI into it then it poses no challenge at all. Without challenge theres no point even playing it.

Multiplayer campaign was tagged onto ETW after several patches, Implemented in NTW and now its going to be part of Shogun. Where are the mod tools? Why is ETW and NTW still hard coded to significant modding? They are just FOS and i've no time for their lies anymore.

In the PC Gamer review they really liked the AI. The reviewer set his first game to the hardest level, not expecting much opposition, and got trashed directly.

Eh? my ETW doesnt show an option for campaign multiplayer and i've the latest patch. o.O

I agree with you though, i'm not purchasing another TW game until they get their stuff right.



PC gamer has not had a reliable review of any game for a long time. If a publisher does not get a good review they cease advertising on their magazine..hence, good reviews all around. They only give bad scores to little companies that aren't repeat customers.

AI in all TW games does not make it better at fighting you all it does is increase the AI unit's morale on the battlefield to cheat-like levels and gives the campaign AI insane amounts of money to build stacks upon stacks of crap. This has been so since the days of shogun 1.. heck in empire total war and napoleon, on hardest level campaign and battle AI you can have the enemy down to his home province, burn all his infrastructure, besiege his capital city..and it will keep building stacks of high price units because it gets tons of free money per turn. In battle an 'ashigaru/peasant/militia' unit built by the AI under max difficulty gains the morale of a high-morale player unit that is elite veteran status. They just dont rout even if they suffer 95% casualties.

CA does not use AI in the TW games, it uses a table-based reaction 'rules' set. I've always wondered how ETW would fare if they used a neural AI system like the one Derek Smart used on his old Battlecruiser games... that was one impressive self-learning AI !.

Ambivalence:

My main complaint with the graphics is that they are not any better than napoleon or empire's.. and to me they seem just like a higher-res, slightly more adorned versions of shogun1's. I was really expecting a better perspective, camera angle, better overall graphics from this re-make.

I honestly would stand in absolute awe if CA had put the player on the seat of the general's horse.. like in Mount and Blade .. the immersion and perspective would be freaking incredible!

Heh. As an optional mode, perhaps. I prefer a free or mostly-free camera - Combat Mission has that sort of restricted camera (well, at unit level sort of thing) as an option for extra realism but I find it takes some of the enjoyment away.