1. thrash4ever

   10

   Excellent title that strikes a good balance between the modern ranged and melee-based units. Off-map naval artillery is my favourite new ability, and when the foreign marines rank up they become brutal killing machines with suppression and kneel fire enabled. Nice touch with the addition of rail networks to quickly transport troops along the length of Japan. Oh, and Shinsengumi are devastating: from assassinations to quelling dissent and provoking insurrections, truly they are most valuable agent!… Expand

   • Helpful? 5 of 5 users said Yes.
2. mjwilliams84

   8

   I'll get out of the way the fact that I have no interest at all in this late, industrialized period of Japanese history, and move on to how much I still absolutely love this game. The technological advances not only add more units and building options, but actually create a wonderfully immersing backdrop for an already heady, atmospheric campaign. Choose to side with the Emperor or Shogun in a time of political and martial upheaval, and decide to try and maintain the traditional approach to warfare or embrace the new. The added units make ranged combat the order of the day, and with the addition of powerful artillery and naval support create a very engrossing battlefield experience. The campaign map is much bigger than Shogun 2, and looks more detailed with the railroads and surging industry of towns as they grow. The AI is good (although still able to be outwitted fairly easily) and for the most part it runs well without errors. Ignoring Sega's absolutely criminal approach to DLC (which does not affect the quality of the game in itself), I recommend it highly to strategy fans, irregardless of previous Total War experience.… Expand

   • Helpful? 2 of 2 users said Yes.
3. Orctownorc

   6

   Creative Assembly have done a great job in the areas of research and presentation. This game boasts great graphics, great maps, great units, great factions, and a decent sense of historical friction of Japan in a state of transition from medievel society to modernity. Sadly however the elements of game design are not so strong in the single player campaign. As in all CA games this game has an overly mechanical feel about it. War is a process of steady expansion, and it lacks any sense of narrative, identity politics, indeed any sense of politics, diplomacy or political economy. The game (on hardest setting) see saws from TOO HARD at the start to TOO EASY once your faction reaches the point of sufficient mass. Also lots of little things are unbalanced. Agents in particular are WAY OVERPOWERED. A single Geisha can convert all the generals in a rival faction to your army. A single Ninja can kill ever NPC in a faction and so on. This game was never truly play tested. For Multiplayer Fall of the Samurai was a great expansion. But the single player experience is, like all CA games, not very well designed. CA needs to get beyond mechanical expansion and into campaigns based on real diplomacy and real political economy. GROW UP CA! Learn something from Paradox Interactive!… Expand

   • Helpful? 0 of 0 users said Yes.
4. RDonnell

   4

   While a fun addition to the Totalwar series Fall of the samurai is missing key features like bayonets and a patch system to seperate the changes from the base shogun 2 title.The game does not require shogun 2 but massively changes the graphics to shogun 2 anyways and removes loved graphical features such as gloss and breaking the view distance so users are plagued with faceless troops.Depth of field has also been bugged by this system along with many missing textures and other graphical errors like extreme color saturation and buggy shaders.
   
   The expansion seems to massively downgrade the graphics engine for the old shogun 2 users and as such without a way to stop steam from updating users have to put up with the changes to thier game even though it is not advertised nor is there any prior warning.The creative assembly team have reported that some of these errors apart from gloss would get looked at but so far after 2 months and many patches the only thing they fixed was the broken blood pack dlc which again was broken by fall of the samurai.So they actively ignore patch requests and bug reports in favour of making money spinning faction DLC packs and map creators!
   
   This company seem to like to advertise thier games with features they like to remove later on and refuse to patch or correct so i do not see how i can give this title above a 4 rating which should of been an 8 if they would of corrected the errors and been more humble to what the consumer is sold and afterwards denied access too.… Collapse

   • Helpful? 5 of 13 users said Yes.

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