Total War: SHOGUN 2 Reviews

Good game, cities easy to manage, lots of troop variety. Very well done. There is a time limit; you have to conquer everything on the list by a certain date or you lose.

The late game is grindy but this and three kingdoms are the two games I keep coming back to again and again.

Excellent game and quite different from the original game because of the foreign element and emerging technologies.

Total War: SHOGUN 2 is an experience that I highly recommend for anyone remotely interested in feudal Japan or in the Total War franchise itself.

Beyond good. Started way way back with SG1 and this one gives the same amazing feel. Even now, I fire it up years later for a great game that never gets old.

Firstly, this is the total war with the best Multiplayer-Setup due to the modes of (1) Avatar-Conquest, in which you attempt to conquer the whole of Japan via online battles -> You can customize your troops from their looks to their stats -> You can customize your general from his looks (even his clothes/ uniform) and his skils (e.g. motivating troops, ordering a shore-bombardment) -> Their is a ranking system (2) Normal online battles like the rest of the total war series (Vanilla, rise of the samurai, and fall of the samurai) (3) Campagns (Vanilla, rise of the samurai, and fall of the samurai) Secondly, I personally believe that the AI is more balanced and meaningful in its actions because of its greater agressiveness and even doing ambushes (depending on the faction) that it can pose a threat for inexperienced players. My personal favorite DLC is the Add-on "Fall of the Samurai" because of offering a whole new campagn and experience, in which modern gun-units will engage samurai units and Japan starts to open up and industrializes. I would really recommend this game to any Total War Fan especially the ones, which are more interested in the historical titles.

Not very compatible for MAC OS, it runs smoothly yeah but the camrea movement and pretty much all aspects of the game are pretty delayed and will suddenly crash on me after an hour of the application being open sometimes longer if im lucky.

I only own the Fall of The Samurai (FoTS) DLC campaign, so that is what I will speak to. FoTS is totally worth playing in 2025 and is still by far the best implementation of gunpowder units in a Total War title. That being said, this game is still a blast to play with only traditional units, using the map terrain to ambush and break line of sight with a modern enemy. The morale system, terrain, and unit mechanics make battles a blast no matter which strategy to choose to implement. The siege battles are also amongst the best in the series. Attacking settlements is difficult and requires an appropriate force with a thoughtful approach. Defending is amazing. You can win against insane odds defending a multi-tiered castle with only a handful of units. The naval battles are the best in the series, but there is far too many of them. The AI spams out dozens of 1-2 boat fleets and just tries endlessly to slip past your naval frontline to run from battles in your backline and bombard your provinces. Not only can repairs on high-level buildings get expensive, but unless you have a completely overwhelming force, the autoresolve will not be favorable to you even though you would take 0 damage fighting manually. The manual naval battles themselves take entirely too long, even when the outcome is a forgone conclusion. The ships start so far from each other and the AI will just wait with a broadside facing you if you are the attacker, which you literally always will. If the AI would simply consolidate their armadas, it would probably fix this issue. As it stands, this is by far the worst part of the game. If there is a mod for this that doesn't involve deleting enemy navies, someone please let me know. Diplomatically, the FoTS AI is probably the most crooked I have seen in a TW game. Your best friends and vassals will swap allegiances on a dime and backstab you. I don't hate this, as it plays into the push and pull of the Shogunate vs Imperial faction war that the game has going. If you don't want to participate and do your own thing, you can declare yourself a republic and everyone will want to kill you. Lastly, the campaign layer itself I think is mostly excellent. You get four agent types depending on what side of the conflict you are on and they all have amazing benefits in armies, in your settlements, or on the campaign map. For example, when embeded in a settlement, the Shinsengumi agent of the Shogunate converts provinces to your allegiance and cracks down on public order problems. However, when an enemy army was about to attack my settlement, I used the agent to buy off pretty much the entire army to fight for my side and beat the invader with his own forces. I felt really clever, even though it cost me an arm and a leg. Outside of the powerful agents, the campaign is the classic game of managing public order, boosting your finances, and synergizing your recruitment provinces. The tech tree is also amazing and is completely transformative to gameplay. Making the right tech choices can make or break your campaign, depending on your strategy.

Played as Oda, became Shogun, everyone betrayed me, I clapped back, unify all of Japan. Good game.

Shogun 2 is where the Total War formula reached discipline and balance. Focused, elegant, and tightly designed, it trades bloat for clarity. Every decision matters—from battlefield positioning to clan politics—and the AI is still some of the smartest in the series. The Sengoku era setting isn’t just a backdrop; it shapes everything. Honour, betrayal, restraint—this is strategy with weight behind it. If you want a Total War game that demands respect and rewards precision, Shogun 2 is still the gold standard.