Graphics

Smooth, Soft, Curvy

While the graphics in Shogun are far from perfect, its terrain rendering engine damn near is. Making liberal use of heightmaps, Shogun gives the wanna-be general awesome, natural-looking terrain to fight on. The hills roll and turn gently, sometimes erupting into a mountain, descending into a valley or leveling out into a plain. Forests cover patches of land, while rivers may flow through lowlands or valleys. While not completely lifelike, the graphics are easily good enough to help suspend disbelief and draw the player in.

The Day is ours!

Another bridge battle

The skies themselves are worthy of an award. Creative Assembly, Shogun's developers, seriously put a lot of effort into the texturing. Land looks green and natural, skies can be picturesque or foreboding, depending on the weather - but they look more like pictures than an artist's work. This natural look is very pleasing and easy to get into, greatly adding to the authenticity of the game itself.

Water is present in the game and done quite well but not overwhelmingly so. It is, at best, simply a pretty-looking impassable barrier. Your troops can never ford a river and are forced to use bridges - but the rivers themselves don't look big enough to be worthy of stopping an army. It's a little incongruity that's hard to deal with, so just keep thinking "it flows really fast."

Form up!

Send the Ashigaru scum in first

Thunderstruck

Weather plays a big part in any battle and Shogun has very good weather effects. Snow and rain both make an appearance. They aren't mind-blowing effects but good enough to hold their own with the terrain engine. Obviously, both snow and rainstorms will make extensive use of fog to limit your spotting radius, and worked rather well. We feel it was a bit too easy to spot enemy formations during a shower, while they were concealed in a forest, but that's just a minor quibble.

Their day is coming

Uesugi shows his ugly face

Not So Strong

The one area that we felt Shogun sort of fell on its face is in the unit animations. While it is hard to blame the developers for taking the path they did - after all, maintaining good performance with several thousand units on screen requires shortcuts - at times we wouldn't mind lower performance to get more detailed units.

As it stands, all units are sprites - everything from the lowly arrows and Yari Ashigaru, all the way up to heavy cavalry. These are two-dimensional images which don't require a lot of CPU or graphics time to render, leaving more power for AI and physics calculations. However... they don't look all that good. That's not to say that sprites in general look bad (Baldur's Gate, Nox, Diablo and StarCraft can disprove that), but just that Shogun's seem unnecessarily simple. Yes, they have to be small to fit so many on the screen and given all the limitations faced by the developers, they did a damn fine job - but, in the end result, the effect isn't all that impressive, unfortunately.