A gem of a game that just might spell the end for your social-life...
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Pros:
+ Painfully Addictive: I've been addicted to games before, but never to the degree I was with Shogun. You always feel compelled to take that one last territory before you stop, always trying to leave yourself safe, but somehow it never happens; and the next thing you know, it's 4am, but you still won't want to stop!
+ Setting: The feudal Japanese setting is very interesting and unique for a game, and it's very refreshing to sample a culture and piece of history that isn't usually gone over so much in school and the media.
+ Quaterly-Seasons: I like that you can choose exactly what season you make your moves in, allowing you to make more precise strategies and gambles with the weather than later entries in the series.
+ Pure Strategic Combat: It's partly to do with the limited diplomatic options, and partly to do with the fairly small-ish palette of troops available (in comparison to later games in the series), and a big chunk to do with resource-gathering being largely absent from the game: whatever it is, Shogun is about as pure a depiction of the strategy and tactics of war as you'll ever find, and it's a great experience being challenged to truly out-think your opponents with every move you make.
+ AI: It certainly has its issues (mainly that it can't do bridge-battles to save its life), but for the most part, the AI is very cunning, and will make you work hard for your victories - basing its tactics on The Art Of War was clearly a good move!
+ Epic Battles: The scope of the battles is far beyond any other strategy series, and you'll truly feel like a mighty general as you send your troops to their inevetable doom...
Cons:
- Poor Diplomacy: The only real diplomatic options available are full-on alliances, and the computer clearly doesn't pay much of any attention to who's allied to who anyway, making them a bit of a needless distraction as they are.
- Fiddly Map Interface: You get very little information about your provinces by just looking at the campaign map, and digging around to find what you're after can be a fairly awkward, frustrating process.
- Crash-Prone: I can't say how much this is to do with my computer, but I found that the game tended to crash and quit to the desktop a fair bit - it's not a deal-breaker, but you have to make sure you save often.
- Unfair Auto-Battles: It's an understandable means of encouraging you to take command personally, but the auto-battle feature still feels like it screws you whenever you use it, no matter how overwhelmingly in your favour the odds are - a little more fairness would have been good.
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If you want a strategy game that truly makes you think, complete with a unique setting that you'll rarely see in other games, then you can't do much better than Shogun. It's especially ideal if you've got an old system that can't do all the flashy new stuff; but regardless of how old or new your hardware is, as long as you can handle the occasional clumsiness of its campaign interface, this is a brilliant game that anyone should try at least once.