It's a charmless, quality of life-less, bloated, experiment from Shogun 1, to see how much stuff could they put into this before the game crashes again.

It's interesting seeing what would later be refined in Medieval 2, but up there with Empire as being the one of the worst Total War games. Shogun 1 had cute CGI and made the effort to make you feel like you were in a war room with other people! This game however strips away that charm to add in MORE units and building and places to conquer, but it's all just busy work that can become overwhelming in the late game, since you'll be micro managing all your pieces and there's so much to move and build. And building anything takes way too long! Way too much to to do and it looks so sloppy when you're playing! I conquered 80% of the map before coming anywhere close to late game units or buildings. Then the game hard locked after my 100th turn ended, so I can't play that campaign anymore.

This port is very bad. It crashes often, hard locks and the UI wasn't upscaled with the wide screen slapped on in recent years. The AI seems shy to conflict? I've seen major factions lose half their territory to rebels and stay at one provence for the entire game. The battles are also just boring. I can't figure out the specific reason why, but I can easily out flank every army. Zooming in just shows a pixelated mess. Every unit has such a busy design it's hard to tell which units are mine or the enemies. Oh God! also the Unit replenishment system is awful. You have to move that unit onto a territory that can build that unit, then open the unit build option and drag the damaged unit into the unit panel, and every damaged unit heals on-by-one. Just build another unit, save yourself the needless micro.

Nah, didn't like this, and only made me want to play Medieval 2 again.

fun game