The Creative Assembly knows a thing or two about making strategy games. With 10 years of experience making the Total War series, it seemed to them like a good enough time to revisit the first (and greatest, in my humble opinion) Total War game: Shogun. And with 10 years of technological advancements, Shogun 2, this time being published by Sega, comes off like a quantum leap when directly compared to the original. I recently saw the game at E3 2010 in a developer-guided demo of a pre-alpha version of the game.
Fully polygonal soldiers and units are the first big difference, of course, compared to Shogun 1: get in close enough, and you can watch soldiers run up against each other in melee combat, fighting using motion-captured animations. It’s a Total War trademark, that of watching massive groups of soldiers engage in riotous battle, but darn if it doesn’t look a little more impressive when compared to the original Shogun.
Environmental detail is also an impressive bullet point in Shogun 2. The demo I saw started with a dark, rainy night, complete with water-slicked armor on soldiers. From there, it was onto a bright and lovely spring day, complete with landscapes full of cherry blossom trees. The rolling hills of Japan make for nicer scenery than the significantly flatter landscapes in the European-based Total War games, and for what it’s worth, there are also dozens of types of trees! Seriously, though, for a game still pretty early along, the detail of the world, from sky to soil, is already mighty impressive.
Finer details stick out, as well: Shogun 2′s unit selection stands at a relatively paltry 30, well below the maximum of past Total War games. Siege missions are crucial tide-turners if pulled off successfully, but in Shogun 2, you may have a little bit of extra trouble. As it was explained, Japanese castles weren’t exactly walled off completely; a sort of “show us what you got” mentality to their medieval wars. That may mean that your treasured castles could end up in flames earlier than you’d like, so longtime Total War players might benefit from a little readjustment to their strategy from the get-go.
Ok, if you’re a Total War nut, Shogun’s pretty graphics may not immediately sell you on the game, though the trimming of certain aspects of gameplay, along with the additions of others, may still make for some seriously engaging high-level strategy gaming. But for someone like me, who loved Shogun 1 and stopped there, the brief look at its sequel has me already wanting to relive those too-long nights in 2000, in the role of a daimyo, shuttling my men across the wide-open land.
(credit to 1up.com)
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cimaul 28 Mar, 2011--
Source: http://enemyinfestation.com/pc/shogun-2-total-war/
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