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Supporting this of course is beautiful scenery. The richness of Japan's geography is conveyed perfectly with Shogun's 3d engine, supporting smoke, distance haze, and some of the most realistic forestry I've ever seen on a computer. The textures are nearly seamless, and the settings are contoured appropriately to the province in which the battle is being fought. The highlands of Awa make for tough fighting while the open flatland of Sagami begs you to unleash the cavalry in every battle. Similarly, the battlefields are sprinkled with an appropriate amount of chrome - the occasional small town, temple, or structure just to remind you you're fighting for something, after all.
If you've ever played Myth, the camera controls will be familiar. If not, you'll pick them up quickly - depending on where you put the mouse the camera pans, orbits, or rotates effortlessly (within limits set by the visibility - hampered by rain, fog, or snow - and the locations of your troops). Nothing quite matches the anticipation of a new battlefield in low visibility, where you are forced to send the quick-moving cav units to the tops of hills so you are free to look ahead and try to find the enemy before he finds you. And nothing quite matches the skip of the heart when you finally crest a rise and THERE they are, equally rushing to form their battle array. I would say that in moments like this, the tactical game would be much improved if the engine varied a bit in their prebattle notice telling you the enemy's numbers and asking if you wish to retire. Classic to the fog of war is the mis-estimation of enemy numbers - the excitement of the initial probes of battle would be much heightened by the chance that you could suddenly find the enemy's army is staggeringly larger than you anticipated.
Unit controls are all amazingly simple, intuitive, and flexible. Troops can take 3 levels of concentration depending on the liklihood of missile or melee combat, 3 different levels of aggressiveness (from skirmishing archers to always-advancing No Dachi), and any combination of ranks/files that you can manage to manipulate your mouse to create. Everything's hotkeyed, and all the keymaps are customizeable to taste. More fancy formations might be nice, and a scripting ability to pre-form army formations might allow a little more doctrinal flair for players, but neither are necessary. (Hint to TCA for the next version!) There is a decent variety of units, from light cheap spearmen to warrior monks to two-handed swordsmen to arquebusiers (depending on whether you accept the help of the Portuguese and/or Dutch when they finally arrive). Units accumulate honor through battles much like generals, making them more effective over time (though this is handicapped by the no-repair nature of the troops, however. It's invariable that by a few years into the game you will have some small, high honor troops but they aren't that useful since they're so damn small. They're sometimes handy as a "forelorn hope" sort of squad, but overall their impact is less than I would anticipate.)
As the two sides close, waves of arrows fly across the narrowing gap, leaving bodies scattered along a unit's advance. When the armies clash, formations collapse to near-chaos if in melee, and scatter when one side breaks. Individual soldiers fight to the death, bloody bodies heaped where they fell. Cavalry lunges around flanks, sending missile units fleeing in terror until their own cavalry drives the enemy horse away. Generals desperately rally fleeing troops before they get beyond command range, and eventually the fight can continue no longer.
As one side or another finally collapses (very little "fight to the last man" here) an advisor pops on to tell you of your victory - as far as I can tell, defeat is for you to determine. I have noticed that enemy troops - if fleeing and not pursued diligently - will frequently stop and regroup, requiring resolute pounding to flee again. Once the battle is resolved, the battle summary screen comes up (comparing your lost troops vs. "heads taken" - I guess there's no more certain way of getting a count than that...) the tactical engine closes and you are returned to the strategic level with your troop strengths adjusted.
One a tangential note, if all you seek is the battles Shogun caters to your taste as well. At the opening menu you have the chance to choose to play one of six famed historical battles, well selected for being winnable without being too easy. You may also play semi-customizeable battles (you can control the variety of troops or get random ones; you can set the terrain but not the placement of units) to your heart's content. Note that whilst you can select that you are the attacker or defender in a custom battle, typically you end up attacking. Even setting up a combat where I am the defender and inside a castle leaves the AI units sitting stopped just outside of missile range.
The key to the entire experience is the visceral feel of the thing, and critical to this is the sound. I didn't mention it in the strategic element (although the background music is excellent and the voice work - in a Japanese-English argot that is pleasantly atmospheric but not excessive - equally so), but it's in the tactical engine that the sound is really outstanding. Ambient sounds of cicaidas and birds fill the air at the start, a quiet that you learn is foreboding. The sounds of battle follow inevitably, from the chorus of "hai!" that acknowledges orders, to the dynamic music that builds throughout and changes character with the context of the conflict, and are amazing.
The number of units on the battlefield is scalable at the outset to address the wide levels of hardware available to gamers, making the whole experience available to a surprisingly low end of machine. Visible weather effects (which are always IMPLEMENTED on the battlefield, but which can also really drag a system to its knees) are optional, as are high-quality textures.
EA has implemented an almost RPG quality to the multiplay, by having you log onto their server and take a name that maintains your record over time. One rather baffling organizational note - you have to register with the site via web browser BEFORE you can log in through the game. That tricky hurdle negotiated, you're presented with the chat room/open game presentation standard, where the player chat rolls by while open games are listed at the top. The games are shown as either "competitive" - where the outcome is logged in the ranking statistics - or "friendly" where it isn't. When you host or join a game, it kicks you into a separate room where the other players (I saw as many as 6 in a game) determine roles, insignia, etc. Once the game kicks off, it's exhilarating. With humans you always have to keep an eye out for more audacious moves: I was desperately losing one battle until a unit of lancers (sent on a wide swing to the right) suddenly appeared behind my opponent's command unit of arquebusiers. A few moments later, his troops were streaming past mine in rout. (The death of a general causes a morale hit to all troops of that side. By the middle of a battle this can be critical as suddenly all his troops waver and flee. There is, as in the single player game, the possibility for limited rally but it's only successful if you can find shelter from direct contact with an enemy unit. In any case, rallied units are typically fragile and will not stand up to a heated pounding anymore in that battle.) As always, multiplayer is great fun; unfortunately my screen-cap program was completely baffled trying to pictures. I have to apologize to the guys that gave me such great opportunities for screen shots the other night - Shiba Styopa will be back online this week!
As usual, I have a beef about the single-company server mentality. EAPlay got in the way less than most, but the routinely bad lag probably has a lot to do with the fact that I couldn't see any method of internet play that DIDN'T involve EA's server. Misleadingly called a "persistent world" (yes, the battle stats are saved, but there's no 'world' to give context to the battles - they're as faceless as a pickup game of Counterstrike) there's no reason NOT to allow direct IP-address play. Nevertheless, it's a beautiful sight when an opponent is suckered into a trap - the AI is too conservative and, except in certain circumstances, rarely allows such a thing to happen. Only with humans!
Finally, to prepare the serious player, the cd contains The Way of the Daimyo, a quite comprehensive overview of the history and story of the struggles for the Shogunate, as well as a great deal of background and color information that supplies some of what's missing from one of the worst manuals I've seen in recent years. The cd info is great; I have more than a casual knowledge of Japanese history and I found it a good read, as well as informative. My only complaint is that the information is presented with neither credit (as far as I could tell) nor bibliography. Some of the information would be great to follow up, but there is no avenue for more research. The pitiful manual and it's companion "reference material" is not worth the paper it's printed on, and players should expect that they will have to supplement it with the excellent info already available at various sites online. Whoever was responsible for the documentation - as well as the baffling website at EA - obviously didn't think anyone would really care.
What strikes me overall about Shogun is the immersive, cinematic quality about the whole thing. I've spent the entire review consciously avoiding talking about Kurosawa but the comparison is inevitable (please note I WILL continue to resist haiku for the rest of the review however). The hazy green hills, the crawling masses of troops, the flights of arrows raining death - all are distinctly reminiscent of Kurosawa's films, most notably Ran (1985). In fact, turn up the background music, turn down the lights, change the spoken text to Japanese and put it in widescreen mode; you'll swear you are sitting in a theater watching the action unfold.
I began the review touching on Japanese minimalist style on purpose. Shogun takes a decidedly similar approach to the strategic game (there are neither hundreds of cities to manage nor massive tech trees to explore nor even an interesting diplomatic system) but this is ironically a strong point; the impression of the game left on the player isn't the taking of provinces or the managing of armies. Rather, the beautiful and immediate tactical engine leaves with the player a lasting memory of battles and desperate struggles, a sense of 'activity' that most strategy games lose in the numbers. For one to be a true Shogun, this - the essence, not the form - is what it should be all about anyway.
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Shogun:
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