There were times in Napoleon and Empire that I could barely tell if I was in Austria or Long Island. The Creative Assembly has also done a much better job of making you feel like you’re in Japan. Meaning your standard issue infantry unit won’t necessarily merely cannon fodder-they can fight well! So while you may have tried to march on Berlin with an army filled with a whole hell of a lot of unit types spread across the line, in Shogun 2 each unit type is far more versatile. Russell tells me that there’s fewer distinct unit types compared to Napoleon, but that each type can do more things. You almost feel sorry for the guys having to carry the lanterns across the battlefield. Those little flag-things each soldier has attached to their person sways back and forth as they approach the enemy. Armor glistens in the sunshine (when the sun bothers shining, that is). The soldiers are far more detailed than they were in Napoleon. (The smile on my face as I wrote that sentence!) Wind blows leaves clear across the battlefield, and you really get the sense that, well, it probably wasn’t fun to be a soldier back then. To say they look “good” would be a most criminal understatement. The first thing you notice (see the above video) is the weather effects. Like all Total War games, you alternate between Risk-style campaign maps-the whole of Japan, with the exception of Hokkaido (where at the time there wasn’t as much going on military-wise)-and full-on army vs.

You’d hear wishy-washy answers like, “Oh, I played it for a little bit here and there.” Lies! You people don’t know what it’s like to try to simultaneously fight the Mameleukes, the Ottoman Turks, the Bedouins, and the British-my God, the British!-with a flimsy, ill-supplied French army!Īs the name implies, Shogun 2: Total War takes places in Japan, specifically during the Edo period, the period right before the country was forced to rapidly modernize (read: westernize) due to various outside pressures. (During the demo, Russell asked the other folks present if they’d ever played a Total War game before. I suppose I’m a veteran, having played enough of Napoleon and Empire (along with a bit Rome, if for no other reason than to command an army of war elephants) to know a thing or two about the game.

The goal for Shogun 2, as Russell explained to me, was to simultaneously make the game easier to play for people new to Total War, and to make the game harder to master for Total War veterans.

Total war 2 map