NOBUNAGA'S AMBITION: Awakening Reviews

Anytime the name of the game is in all caps, you know the game is good.

The game is very bittersweet. While the whole idea is great and i like the various mechanics it offers, it's very difficult and annoying to get anything war related done. It's really annoying to go on the offensive because more often than not the game will give you several reasons to abandon siege and go back to your land, may that be enemy reinforcements, lack of resources or another clan taking advantage of you being away to attack you. Even when you have an ally to cover one of the sides so you can fully focus your attacks into a single target, the game still throws at you more reasons to abandon everything than to keep going. For example, it's extremely easy to lose the castle you just got for yourself because after the battle you have no forces to defend it properly. It's very hard to reinforce battles that are already happening because usually your soldiers will not reach it in time, and as soon as you lose, the enemy will have it's units restored in their castle, so all that effort will be for nothing. You can't maneuver your armies all that well either because each second they stay on the field, they lose resources and have to go back to resupply, so unless you have planned every single step of your attack, you will not even be able to take advantage of attacking from multiple angles. The game gives you access to small groups of soldiers which you can hire as mercenaries to help you out and annex them eventually, but sometimes when they lose a battle, you have to pay them again to reinforce you next time, which can be pretty annoying on the early game economy, which requires at least 1000 bucks to do any action such as hiring the mercenaries, sabotaging the enemy castles, etc. Eventually you can outgain all of those costs and all that will matter will be the time to take those actions but i find that pretty unbalanced. The game has a manual battle option which doesn't work unless you have at least two allies on the field and other requirements which i still don't know to happen, but you can count that most of the battles you will not be able to manually fight. The battles are very simple and all you can do is order your units to walk to specific spots on the map and try to use your other units to do a pincer maneuver and kill everybody. Fighting manually is much better than waiting for the battles to finish on the campaign map, so you want to play every battle, but they end up ultimately being the exact same fight since there's only one good strategy. Diplomacy requires you to send an officer to the clan you wish to gain trust with and that takes quite a while to get done, usually by the time you can finally have an alliance, you will already be at war with someone else, but having an alliance doesn't even mean you can count on your ally, it just means you won't be attacked by them. To have them reinforce you, you have to build even more trust and it is a resource that gets used whenever you ask them to do anything, so you need to keep sending officers if you wish to get anything done diplomacy wise. Just like with the economy, it's very annoying to deal with early game, but you might find yourself having a lot of officers to spare later on to do this for you. You can become a stronger clan's vassal if you wish to not get immediately destroyed, but that costs you the entirety of the diplomacy system, which will be completely locked off for you with the exception of the clan you surrendered to, but that doesn't even guarantee they will help you out, that just guarantees they won't attack you. After about 5 hours of gameplay i was still stuck on my 2 castles outgaining any costs i have while trying to wage war on the same enemy while they get reinforced every single time and whenever i'm close to getting their castle, either resources or lack of soldiers take it away from me. Any action i use to damage their castle or take their soldiers away to battle them out of the castle ends up being a waste of time and money since they get reinforcements from a much bigger ally and restore their units extremely fast at the same time. In the end, i really like the idea of the game and it's simple yet complex enough to keep you hooked, but it's very annoying to play since the game keeps pushing you back to deal with X, Y or Z situation so the game ends up being reaaaally slow and unrewarding.

Fantastic simulation/strategy game. Really addictive building your clan up and making moves, with really nice text 'cutscenes' with great art explaining the history and lore as it happens in realtime during your game. Fun stuff.