Review: Shogun: Total War
As the daimyo of a 16th century clan fighting to unite Japan under a single ruler, this majestic 3D war game allows you to recreate six famous battles, roll your own, or play out confrontations as they occur in the course of a less-than-majestic strategic game.
As the daimyo of a 16th century clan fighting to unite Japan under a single ruler, this majestic 3D war game allows you to recreate six famous battles, roll your own, or play out confrontations as they occur in the course of a less-than-majestic strategic game.
Despite the epic scale of these confrontations--as many as 5,000 individual troops on the move at any given time--the mouse controls are appealingly easy to learn. The soldiers are already arranged in formation (which you can adjust to your liking) and you have simply to click on a unit or its screen-corner icon to take control of it. Each man--from no-dachi samurai wielding giant swords to arquebusier musketeers--is represented by a tiny, detailed, fully animated sprite. And when they clash under a somber sky amid rolling green hills and plains, the result is like nothing I've seen. The battles are a revelation--scenes from an Akira Kurosawa samurai film brought to virtual life.
The 3D is moody, the scale colossal and the vast battles leave me full of feeling for the event. Shogun never lets you forget the terrible beauty of war. It's embodied in the sense of omnipotence when a huge enemy army appears out of the mist, its ranks extending to the horizon and bristling with weapons. It's in the thicket of arrows that invariably pierce the air when archers come within range. It's in the yells of charging soldiers mingling with the screams of the fallen. It's in the tiny corpses that litter the fields afterward. Computer games have always been better at communicating information than emotion, but the extraordinary detail in Shogun makes defeat seem utterly tragic. It's a defining moment for real-time strategy and a game whose pure sense of spectacle will appeal even to non-strategists.
The only shortcoming is an occasionally erratic artificial intelligence. Generally speaking, it's smart--concealing troops in woods, holding units in reserve, withdrawing from battle without withdrawing from the battlefield, or waiting for the human player to declare himself. But the presence of my units atop a steep slope in one battle seemed to throw it into a kind of delirium, and in another its path-finding sited some troops neck-deep in a stream.
Oddly enough, the AI is probably the best part of the strategic game. Even at the "easy" level, the enemy watches carefully for holes in your defenses and its predilection for slipping forces into weakly defended territories can tie you in knots.
In this mode, Shogun becomes a Diplomacy-like board game in which your orders are carried out simultaneously with those of six other daimyo and a faction of rebels and bandits. You can still fight battles in detail, with an option for speedy simulation. But you're also responsible for training troops, dragging and dropping them around a scrolling horizontal map, planting the castle-based technology tree that enables their creation, building mines and ports and beefing up farms to boost your income, striking pacts with neighbors and foreign visitors, and dispatching spies and assassins.
That may sound like a lot to do, but the game turns into a monotonous litany of reports of structures built and provinces taken or lost. Diplomacy almost doesn't exist, and assassinations and spying cry out for full sub-games--or at least incorporation of this strategic mode into the otherwise excellent multiplayer game, where human plotting and scheming would flesh out this rather thin campaign. Indeed, this whole mode sometimes seems like little more than an ornate shell for the samurai battles ?
? those tragic, wonderful samurai battles.
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