Instead of the known world, now we have Japan. The other problem is that somehow, despite the incredibly volatile period and the vast ambition of merging such diametrically opposed technologies and peoples, Fall of the Samurai feels safe. Hrm. Feudal Japan was still pretty feudal in the early 1800s, while the British and the French were gallivanting around the globe with steamboats and smooth-bore rifles, and it wasn't until 1842 that the Japanese even allowed Western ships near their borders. This is all a roundabout way of saying that So it's not hard to ignore those niggles, especially when you've got an excitable eight year old in your head jumping around and making gun noises as he pretends to swing a sword about. Diplomacy is still a simple affair, with trade agreements and military alliances, and you still dispatch agents to assassinate, sabotage and coerce. Tough like trying…Now in 2012, and in a pleasant about-face, they've released an expansion pack that actually plays and feels like an all-new FotS occupies a very strange place in the catalogue of By making it a standalone expansion, Creative Assembly and Sega have pitched this just right. But Fall of the Samurai does rewrite a few chapters.There's a wonderful sense of imbalance to the whole expansion (which is its own separate install, and playable without the main game), with cannons tearing apart castles that were clearly not meant to withstand cannon fire. All of these are not without cost, however. It's a vastly smaller, more intricate playing field, but it's also one that scales excellently with the game's engine. Which makes it a shame that none of those ideologies are reflected in the game itself. Before being laughed at by his classmates. The economical buildings, too, are all vastly superior if you choose to adopt the Western styles, generating more money for you, and better units and benefits for your people. In theory trains should be the perfect troop transports, zipping your men from one end of your territory to the other, but in reality if you don't have a perfectly connected rail system, you can't go anyThe same problems that plagued Shogun 2 are present here, too, with insufferable load times, wonky pathfinding and an ever so slightly idiotic AI on the campaign map. The modernisation mechanic is the same for both, and both can quite happily create international trading ports that welcome the French, British or Americans into Japan. Total War: Shogun 2-Fall of the Samurai is a highly addictive and generally well-rounded game. None of this is wildly evolving the well-established Total War formula, though. Silly child: But, evidently, it does have a few time capsules.
But after the West was allowed to dock, Japan went from sword-wielding warriors to regimented platoons of rifle-bearing troops in half a century.It's not only about the weapons, but also the massive changes to infrastructure that went on during the period. It's tough! It's got more than enough changes to keep Which they should. You still build your forces, aggressively expand into neighbouring territories, and then build the infrastructure and economy to fund bigger, better forces. Change is never welcome, and when you're dealing with change of this magnitude it breeds a particularly potent resentment. The focus of the new expansion is the rapid modernization of Japan in the context of Boshin War. That's not the only convenience of this setting for Creative Assembly. About as short a time as the typical game of Total War, in fact. It’s not often we review an expansion pack but we make an exception when the new content is a standalone game which offers a largely different experience to the original.This is the case with Total War: Shogun 2: Fall of the Samurai which is set during the 19th Century and explores the conflict between the Japanese Imperial throne and the last Shogunate. The few genuinely new mechanics that Fall of the Samurai introduces, especially railways, feel clumsy.