Creative Assembly and Sega have just launched a Total War: Shogun 2 remaster, promising an "updated, enhanced, and complete version of the grand strategy classic." Considering only 19% of all reviews are positive, with one player describing it as "the upscaled cash grab edition," clearly, that promise has been broken.
Right now, the game has 1,337 negative reviews, and just 318 positive reviews, earning it an "Overwhelmingly Negative" score on Steam. Reviewers complain that bugs from the original remain unfixed, while the 'complete edition' adds entirely new bugs, like desynced cinematic audio and hotkeys breaking unit selection.
Atlas_Ludde wrote an extensive breakdown of new bugs, returning bugs, and graphical issues that you can read here.
"The whole point of the community wanting these 'old' games ported to 64-bit is better stability and performance, which this game fails miserably at," writes Xukaku. "Instead, they gutted the game of Steam Workshop support, and it runs noticeably worse than other modern titles (3K and WH3)."
Worst of all, the original game has been delisted, and while there's a discount for existing owners, that discount has an expiry date. After which, everyone will be expected to pay $40 for an inferior version. Bugs and performance issues are only the tip of the iceberg too, as the remaster appears to use generative AI artwork, or at least AI upscaling, without disclosing it on the store page.
"CA used AI to make the new unit cards, they look awful and characters have missing fingers," alleges JMMMHAMM.
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