Hello, you are listening to Three Moves Ahead, and I'm your host Rob Zakene.

Today we're going to be talking about the new Shogun II expansion, Fall of the Samurai, and how it opens sort of a new frontier for the Total War series and where it needs to be better. Joining me today is our old friend, freelance writer, Phil Cameron. Phil, welcome to the show. Hi, thanks for having me. And we also welcome for the first time PC Gamer staff writer Tom Senior.

Tom, welcome to the show. Hi, thanks for having me. And we also welcome for the first time PC Gamer staff writer Tom Sr. Tom, welcome to the show.

Hello, thank you.

So we've all written reviews of Fall of the Samurai, and it looks like we're all pretty happy with it.

Tom, why don't you get us started with what's new here and what makes fall of the

samurai a little different than, you know, stuff we've seen before in total war?

Well, essentially the campaign has moved 300 years on from the events of Shogun too, and it revolves

around the Bojan War, which was essentially a war in which traditionalist forces within Japan fought against the influx of new technologies from abroad.

And essentially it was a huge turnaround in terms of the technological makeup of the country and that affected the warfare throughout the period of the ocean war.

So it would start out as fairly traditional, close combat warfare, and as guns came in, as the bigger cannons came in, as Gatlin guns came in,

and as more of that technology kind of flooded in through trade, that slowly changed the face of war and slowly changed the fortunes of the two warring factions

within Japan at the time. So there's traditional forces and there's kind of the new uprising forces.

And essentially the new campaign is that narrative told over the course of a total war campaign.

And yeah, that's pretty much how it pans out.

The kind of new technologies they bring in are some of the really big stuff like Gatling guns

and some of the larger cannons are some of the most advanced weapons that have been in a total war game.

And there's some enormous stuff they bring an artillery which is

easily the most devastating weapon that has ever featured in a total war game i think easily uh it

has the power to obliterate entire units if you've used it correctly and it's kind of ludicrous in a

brilliant way there's no way it's historically accurate when you call in this artillery artillery, it's almost like a flare-drop, so it's small firelights and you get this in almost World War I-style barrage that can take out entire units and lay armies to waste. So that's a lot of the new stuff that it's really brought in. New technologies like railways as well on the campaign map, that's a bit of a game changer.

But really, it's kind of, for me, a lot of it was amalgamating a lot of the stuff that Shogun 2 did really well in terms of that melee combat with some of the stuff that former Tote War games have done really, like the gun combat of Empire and Napoleon, and transitioning from one to the other. And that's really

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