| Originally Posted by Tom Chick Pirates and ninjas are old and busted. The new hotness is zombies and samurais. Enter Skulls of the Shogun for all your zombie samurai needs! This charmingly and bobble-headedly cartoonish strategy game has all the trappings of turn-based gaming with none of the stuffiness. Yeah, sure the skeleton cavalry mounts clop and whinny endearingly and your mustachioed undead samurai general is about the cutest thing this side of a hamster dance. But don't let that fool you.
Skulls of the Shogun doesn't look like a strategy game. It looks like some sort of Flash animation about undead warriors from ancient China trying to fight their way into the underworld. As the first few missions set the stage for the storyline -- don't worry, you can just jump into multiplayer or skirmish games against the A.I. if you want -- they also teach you that you're not just looking at animation. The game is telling you things without sticking numbers under your nose.
For instance, there is no grid to display movement distance. Instead, each unit shows a movement radius when you select it. Just pick up your little dude and drop him wherever you want him to go. It has the simple unfettered feel of moving miniatures around a board, and it's very gamepad friendly. Consider how Nippon Ichi's Phantom Brave used a similar gridless approach without compromising the hardcore math under the hood.
There's plenty of math in Skulls of the Shogun, but it's all simple +1 or +2 stuff. Each unit's hit points are indicated by the size of the flag on his back. Before you commit to an attack, you'll see how much damage you'll inflict, plus how much you'll take from the counterattack, clearly indicated by marks on the flag. As a unit gets more powerful, the flags multiply to show how many actions he can take. As a unit is injured, the flags tatter and shorten. When a unit has attacked for the turn, he simply sheathes his sword. It can get busy when units cluster together, but the information is plain as day and numbers-free.
Your army consists of infantry, archers, and cavalry, all recruited by spending the rice you earn for capturing and holding rice paddies long enough to strip them clean. Three unit types might seem simplistic, but consider that you can capture shrines on some maps, which will automatically recruit a monk based on the shrine type. Fox monks heal your units, salamander monks toss powerful long-range fireballs, and trickster crow monks blow units around the battlefield.
Wait, why would you want to blow a unit around the battlefield when you could just smack it with a sword? Here's one area where Skulls of the Shogun shows the nuance you might not expect given the cute graphics. When you attack a unit, it might get knocked back. This is helpful, because when a unit has to move into range to attack, its attack might not be optimal. One way to counter knockback is to keep units packed closely together, into spirit wall formations, indicated by colored circles at the units' feet. Any unit in a spirit wall is immune to knockback. But with a trickster crow monk, you can easily blow some hapless unit out of its spirit wall. Divide and conquer!
But Skulls of the Shogun has an even greater reason to encourage you to arrange your units in knockback-proof spirit walls. Ringouts! If you knock a unit off the edge of the map, it's dead, no matter how many hit points it has, no matter how much it's been upgraded, whether it's a regular zombie, a demon, or even a general. Suddenly that trickster crow monk doesn't seem so useless.
Another unique point that sets Skulls of the Shogun apart is the skull system. When you kill a unit, its skull remains on the map. Units can eat enemy skulls for extra hit points. Not just healing, but extra hit points above and beyond the unit's starting hit points. And when you eat three skulls, your unit turns from a zombie into a demon. What good are demons? Well, they get two actions per turn. Why? Because demons don't have rigor mortis. Duh.
This is an elegant variation on the concept of experience points, and it introduces some tough decisions. Do you eat a skull as your unit's action instead of attacking? How much do you put your unit at risk to get a dropped skull? Do you spread skulls around to keep your army healthy? Or do you make a beeline to get a demon as soon as possible? Do you dare bring your general into play to eat skulls, because the victory condition is always and only to kill the enemy general? But a demon general is a terrible thing to behold. You want a demon general, don't you? Who wouldn't? You can wrestle with these questions yourself when Skulls of the Shogun comes out of the PC and Xbox 360 later this year. |
04-15-2011, 06:21 PM 
