Publisher: Sega
Developer: Creative Assembly
System requirements: 2 GHz Intel dual-core/2.6 GHz Intel single-core or equivalent CPU, 1 GB RAM (2 GB for Vista/Win 7), 256 MB DirectX 9.0c-compatible graphics card with Shader Model 3.0 support, 20 GB hard-drive space
Genre: Strategy
ESRB rating: Teen
Release date: Available now

Coming away from the successful release of Napoleon: Total War with good sales, The Creative Assembly has decided to go back to where it all began. Total War: Shogun 2 is a remake of their classic first release, and gamer expectations could not be higher. Competing not only against a market full of strategy games, but also against their own earlier success, the designers have undertaken a task that is almost as difficult as the historical politics covered by the game, which is set in the Warring States period of 16th-century Japan. Your goal is to become Shogun. And since every other clan is also trying to become Shogun, there’s a lot of fighting and diplomacy along the path to victory.

Veterans of the series will be in familiar territory in Shogun 2. The game still sports a turn-based campaign mode, with real-time tactical battles. During campaign turns, you must manage your economy, provinces and armies to achieve your strategic goals. Taxes must be collected, trade must be initiated and maintained, your civilian populace must be kept pacified, and the army must be fed. There are province improvements that need building, as well as technologies that need to be researched.

Of course, all of this strategic management is meant to give you an army and navy with which to conquer your enemies, and it’s in the tactical battles where most players will find that the game shines. Battles can be fought on a variety of maps and under a variety of conditions, including at night, complete with its own special rules. Tactical battles are similar to those in the other games in the series, with the added advantage that the AI in Shogun 2 is smarter than the AI in Napoleon: Total War. There are plenty of troop types and options for employing them on the battlefield, although they all break down into the standard rock/paper/scissors motif of spears beating cavalry, cavalry beating swords, and swords beating spears, with archers beating everyone if they can hold their enemies at range. Assaults on castles provide a different challenge, as there are covert ways of bringing down the gate, as well as plenty of siege equipment for brute-force entries.

Multiplayer has been given an extensive overhaul. Now, not only are there a variety of ways to play online, including cooperative campaigns and drop-in games, but there is also the avatar campaign mode. As in FPS games, the avatar campaign mode features the creation of an avatar that unlocks various perks as games are won. What makes this interesting is that there’s a long list of multiplayer maps, each one corresponding to a region of Japan. Your avatar unlocks new bonuses and abilities for winning on specific maps in specific regions. This gets complicated when a player joins an online clan. Clans have leaderboards, and they fight other clans in 1v1 or 2v2 battles that are tied to specific regions. As a result, supporting your clan in battles means fighting where the clan needs to fight; in order for your clan to support you, it needs to pick battles that will unlock things you need. The potential for rewarding multiplayer is staggering.

The Creative Assembly has put together such a nice way to do multiplayer, it’s too bad that it’s so buggy. While some players have had it worse than I have, I found that online matches are plagued by crashes and lag. Perhaps even worse is the occasional inability to add skills to your avatar. But the worst problem with multiplayer is, in fact, a poor design decision. Losing players can currently drop from a game and not get a loss added to their record. This also prevents the winner from gaining a win. Your avatar still gains experience points, but I can’t understand why such a loophole was allowed in the game, especially considering that it’s run through Steam. At the very least, the game should penalize quitters with an automatic loss. All of these issues have made the multiplayer community somewhat angry, and while the developers have promised to fix these problems, no patch has been released as of this writing.

Aside from these issues, I found Total War: Shogun 2 to be a solid strategy game. It’s not quite up to the hype, thanks to problems in multiplayer, but no one should be fooled into thinking that it’s not a good game. If you like the series, pick up a copy on Steam for $49.99. Just wait to do multiplayer until the game is patched.

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