• Game: Sengoku
• Platform: PC
• Publisher: Paradox Interactive
• Developer: Paradox Interactive
• ESRB: T
• Genre: Strategy
• Players: 1+



• What's Hot: Beautiful map; compelling dynasty building mechanics; refreshing take on a popular historical setting; war is not always the answer



• What's Not: Interface can intimidate; war is bland and interminable; finding useful characters is harder than necessary.

Review by: Kevin Hutchins

Sengoku, the newest title by Paradox Interactive, does a great job of breaking out of the rut that strategy games tend to get into when the market is geared towards one general goal: the taking of other people’s stuff by force. It does its best to present you with a series of tools that are driven by characters; by people as opposed to faceless armies, and you quickly realize that the army that you were planning to raise, as you often might in other strategy games, is only one piece of an arsenal that extends to ‘weapons’ like marriage, assassination, plotting, and even genetics.

This game is really about great people, and more generally, great and powerful families. Your objective is to build and manage a dynasty that has the resources and ability to turn its advantages into territorial gains, through conventional and non-conventional means. This is technically not new for Paradox and its fans; the company broke ground on this concept with Crusader Kings and has been refining it for the last seven years; Sengoku is simply the latest iteration.

The basic idea is that you, as patriarch of a family, must do your best to find the right people with the right statistics to help you manage your government, marry your heirs, and govern your outlying provinces. These people have their own loyalties and agendas that might not match up with yours, but, as you learn, that is your problem—not theirs. How you deal with other characters and turn those dealings into gains is the meat of the game; you’ll find yourself only ever using armies to fix mistakes in planning or to quickly patch over some rotten luck that’s holding you back.

This is a bit of a blessing, because war is really dull. You have a grand total of three unit types at your disposal and one of them, the arquebusiers, are only available to rulers who are Christian converts. (Which I had very few chances to be) This leaves you with generic foot soldiers and cavalry, which can be raised from peasant levies, purchased as your personal retinue, or recruited from ronin who wander Japan with their own armies. There is no human intervention in combat; simply a panel that displays the results of dice rolling in the background when two opposing armies meet in a province. There’s not much to do here but make sure you have the biggest army in the field with a competent general at the helm.

Another distraction is the town siege. In order to capture a province by force, you need to siege the main town and castle that guards it. If the defenses are significantly upgraded, these sieges can last years upon years and can bog down the player who relies too heavily on force to gain territory. The jury is still out on whether this was the intention of the developers; I found myself actively avoiding war simply because I just couldn’t bear to wait through another series of decade-long(!) sieges and bloody assaults. It was a real drag, to be sure, and I decided it just wasn’t for me.

I found it much more fulfilling to use the other gameplay elements to obtain the lands required to win the game. There’s no escaping that you need be the leader of a clan that owns more than half of Japan’s provinces in order to declare yourself shogun and thus win the game. The only realistic way I found to do this is use the characters in your family “court” to press for an advantage. Because all inheritance of land in Sengoku passes through the male line, one of the major ways to gain land is to ensure that your heirs become first in line of succession to a given province or provinces owned by another character. I found it extremely worthwhile to marry my sons to the first born daughters of wealthy landowners, wait until the two little lovebirds produced a healthy son, and then shed a single tear when the news of the untimely death of the elder lord reached my ears. Accidents will happen, as the old saying goes.