After Empire and Napoleon I thought SEGA and CA would have made efforts to improve their image. They did not.
Because Total War was one of my favorite and most cherished series ever, I took a leap of faith and purchased Shogun Total War 2. I'm about 10 hours into the game and I'm completely and totally disappointed.
To start, the game isn't very well optimized. I have a beast of a rig and I can run every setting on the game in 'ultra' without slowdown, but it takes ages to start the game up and the loading screens are long, frequent and boring.
Next, even on ultra graphics setting, this game is UGLY. I'm really not sure what happened, but graphically this game looks worse than Medieval Total War II, which is something like a 5 or 6 year old game. There is very little detail on the units, they move funny, and the zoom functions on the battle map aren't as functional. One of the best parts of the previous Total War games (not including Empire or Napoleon) was the ability to zoom right in on the action and see individual units battling it out with one another. The battle and camera interface in this game is a lot clunkier and doesn't allow the same sort of zoom in and zoom out features you had in older Total War games.
Next, which has always been a huge problem with CA and which they have never seemed to bother to fix, is that the AI is still TERRIBLE. Enemy generals still charge right into your spearmen all by themselves and die (thus leading to the rout of what is often a vastly superior enemy army), the enemy still can't figure out how to ferry troops across the sea (which gives you an enormous tactical advantage) and enemy siege tactics are still a joke. The only thing that saves the game in this respect is that there is a drop-in feature which allows fellow players to drop into battles in your campaign and fight them out with you. The few fun and exciting challenges I've had in this game were against fellow players, and they turned into nail-biters sometimes.
Unfortunately, the enemy AI is equally as bad on the campaign map. They leave their cities undefended. They rarely gather substantial armies (even on difficult settings), preferring instead to send small groups out to uselessly raid your outlying resources where they end up getting destroyed piecemeal against your intelligently drawn up and cohesive armies (seems they're still using the same code from Empire). Diplomacy does seem a little better in that you can finally make alliances and your allies don't actually declare war on you anymore for attacking a mutual enemy, but there still seems to be little point in diplomacy itself. Your allies don't actually ever help you, so the purpose of the alliances has eluded me thus far.
For me really, the worst part of the game is simply how ugly and clunky it is. Patches could still fix the performance issues, but this is an UGLY game. I'm not even sure what CA was trying to do here. The graphics don't have to be top notch in a strategy game to be fun, but they at least have to look clean. CA definetly rushed this game and it really shows.