Fall of the Samurai, like the original Shogun 2, is good enough that I heartily recommend it to everyone who owns a PC regardless of their experience with or opinion of the grand strategy genre. If you're coming into the series for the first time there is a lot to learn, but you'll be amply rewarded with hundreds of hours of top-notch entertainment should you make the investment.
Like any good expansion – even standalone expansion – it doesn't just add things to the original, it changes them. You'll get an experience much more like a Civil War-era wargame with Fall of the Samurai, as opposed to a medieval wargame with the original Shogun 2, and that, in itself, is worth the cost of admission, let alone all the new units, locations, abilities, factions, and bells/whistles.
This is the best Total War game out of those I've played (Rome, Medieval 2, Empire, Napoleon, Attila) and I always find myself coming back to it. The lasting appeal is very high. Different factions call for quite different strategies and each campaign is typically long. The wide array of technology in the units will have you trying out different combinations obsessively. The agents are fantastic and really come in handy when you're at a disadvantaged position. The AI is not the best and is probably the weak point of the game, but it's still an improvement over previous TW installments. Great graphics and sound. Learned a lot about 19th century Japan.
This game hardly deserves the 10 I'm giving it, because it has little replayability : all factions feel the same. Apart from that, it is in my opinion the very best TW game. How could such a game be turned into R2TW????
Fall of the Samurai is one of the best expansion packs that we've seen in a long time. The huge amount of new troops, technologies en agents make sure that you'll never get bored with the campaign. There are a lot of new strategic options to discover in both singleplayer and multiplayer.
The Boshin War marked the end of one era in Japan's history. The civil war, fought from 1868 to 1869 between forces of the Tokugawa shogunate and the Imperial troops, provides an excellent basis for a Total War game. Caught between the crossfire of different factions, Western influences and rapid technological development, Japan was reshaped. Fall of the Samurai draws successfully from this interesting setting. The battles are as massive and tactical as ever and conquering Japan province by province is immensely satisfying despite the familiar feeling of the game. [Apr 2012]
Creative Assembly manages to innovate the previous Shogun 2 chapter by changing era and adding fireweapons to the conflicts. Thankfully this creates a well balanced mixture that is sure to be liked by many, if not every, fan of the series.
The addition of gunpowder brings a whole new layer of strategic complexity to the battlefield. An expansion pack that manages to improve upon an already great game.
Fall of the Samurai is a good expansion pack for one of the best strategy games of 2011. It gives a great history lesson about en epoch in japanese history the western hemisphere tend to forget. Furthermore, it is the first time the Total War franchise shows the staggering effect the industrial revolution had on military warfare - evolve or die.
This is the best game i ever played and still playing it totally amazing love the rail way system and the new weapons /units for the choice thumbs up with a 10 10
A decent game, but as others have pointed out, guns don't really belong in the total war series, and this game is an example of that. Guns don't offer arching and can't shoot over units, so it's really easy to rush a line of riflemen with any melee infantry, even spear levy. The result is a very quick rout.
Singleplayer gets tedious really fast, Japan gets divided in two - Shogun up north, empire down south, and one has to attack over very long distances. This is where enemy's use of ships to blockade trade routes gets really annoying- the enemy keeps spamming stacks of 1-2 ships, and it's a hassle to chase them all, especially since they can magically retreat really far away most of the time.
In terms of clans, there's really minimal differences between them. The shogun/empire divide is only visible in the early game, as capturing enemy settlements later on allow a player to field both samurais/ninjas and best riflemen, like US marines.
Castle sieges were disappointing, as the enemy is utterly ****. It can neither attack nor defend properly, and seeing AI try to climb the same tallest wall in my castle with 5 squads of 150 men at once is just too much.
Overall, I don't see myself playing this for long, and it seems like a waste of 30$
A big step forward from the lackluster Shogun 2. FotS adds gunpowder era units into a Shogun setting and it works marvelously. There's nothing more satisfying than calling in your offshore ships to bombard and enemy in a castle and see them get absolutely destroyed, or setting up some Gatling guns before a wall of charging samurai and just watching as they get mowed down. I'm still not a fan of the setting. Japan is a still a very **** country and none of the factions really felt any different from the others. The few interesting factions in the game were locked out and you have to buy a DLC to unlock them even though they are already in the game. FotS loses a point over that scam. Overall though, the game is an upgraded Napoleon and well worth the time of anyone who enjoyed that or Empire.
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 **** 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 **** 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 **** 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.
Utterly atrocious. Everything that was bad about S2 is worse in this.
In battles you literally line up your men and watch them fire, you do absolutely nothing. The few battles that do happen (and they rarely do) are so utterly boring 90% of the time is spent sped up. Defense is even stronger now, provided they don't have artillery. But while artillery evens the playing field it makes the game no more interesting, as again you sit there and wait for your artillery to run out of ammo, or theirs. So if you like a game where you can line up your men and walk away, this is the game for you.
Naval battle are much worse now, and considering that naval battles were so utterly atrocious in S2, that they could have managed to make is worse is a feat in and of itself. Where-as before though you could ignore that aspect of the game, now you have no choice as you're cities will get endlessly bombarded. The flee in circles mechanic is still there, where it you spend your entire time chasing navies that refuse to engage but just run away, during which time 10 other 1 stack units will blockade every port and trade route while bombarding your cities. If by sheer dumb luck you can actually engage an enemy navy, the naval battles are worse than the bumper-car cluster-fck that was S2 naval battles. As stupid as watching 20 ships sit there stuck and unable to move just firing ineffective arrows at each other for 20 min was, Fall of the Samurai's naval battles are even worse. The defender lines his boats up sideways and does nothing, while the attacker has no option but to steam head first into the fire losing almost his entire fleet before being able to fire a single shot. Unless you're MASSIVELY out numbered, you can't lose at naval defense.
I got this on sale for 5$ and still feel ripped off...
SummaryThis massive-scale, stand-alone expansion to Total War: SHOGUN 2 offers a completely new experience to players. Six new playable clans, including those supporting a modern imperial Japan such as the Satsuma and those allied with the old Shogun like the Nagaoka, are now available. Three great foreign powers must also be dealt with: Americ...