by Natasa Shepherd

Created on: July 23, 2011   Last Updated: July 27, 2011

When Total War developers Creative Assembly decided that the next project they would invest their money and time into would be a remake of the game that put them on the map and started a franchise, Shogun :Total War, it must have been like a homecoming. Since the 2001 release of Shogun, Creative Assembly went on to produce five additional Total War games, all of which received critical success and cemented the series as one of the best franchises in the real time strategy genre. Could Total War: Shogun 2 live up to it’s predecessor?

No. Simply put, it couldn’t. Undoubtedly the graphics took a huge leap and the options available to the player are far more vast but unfortunately Shogun 2 seemed stale from the get go. Shogun 2 decided to play it safe and failed to capture the imagination. The options available to the player were not all that dissimilar from other recent incarnations produced by Creative Assembly. So instead of feeling like you were playing a fantastic retelling of the original game, it felt like you were playing Empire: Total War, or another recent game, just with a graphical enhancement that took your soldiers from Europe and into Japan.

There was a reason Shogun hadn’t be remade until now. It was too polarizing for the huge American and European audiences the franchise appealed to. Put Europeans in Europe and they will enjoy conquering places they know and playing the role of historical legends of their region. Put a European in Japan and everything seems to lose context unless your an expert on Japanese history. Also take into account that it seemed that the franchise was going in a totally different route. From the Medieval era we progressed hundreds of years to the 1700’s in Empire: Total War. A game that revolutionized how you played a Total War game due to the inclusion of muskets. And then from there we further progressed to Napoleon: Total War, further solidifying the constant move forward in eras and technology. Then before you knew what hit you, you were smack dab right back in the middle of feudal Japan. Your musket was gone and replaced with the sword once more. The timing couldn’t have been any worse.

Shogun 2 failed to impress because it did nothing new. It had nothing new to bring to the table and ended up being a game that we’ve all seen before when it comes to opportunities for the player. Of course that’s not to imply Shogun 2 was merely Shogun 1 with better graphics, but to say that Empire, Napoleon and even Medieval have all given us the same level of freedom. Until now almost every Total War game in the franchise has had something new to bring to the table, unfortunately Shogun 2 just wasn’t up to par.

2 out of 5.

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