Say what you like about this game, but it has style. Every loading screen and intro sequence has a lovely bit of art and some flavor text. The loading screen tells you to wait calmly and with discipline. A successful battle describes how the enemies fall before your flashing blade. Even losing the game is tempered by a dramatic line describing how you valiantly attempt to impale your opponent as you fall. This game is just dripping with feudal Japanese flavor. However, the actual gameplay is showing its age. The graphics are... well, you can't expect much from a 256-color DOS game. The one-on-one swordfights have clunky controls and slow movement, and the army battle minigame (a sort of Total War-ish RTS battle) is just crying out for mouse controls instead of the numpad they saddle you with. The only minigame that really holds up is the one-vs-many melees. The random environments, and varied enemies and objectives mean that there's some decent depth to the gameplay, and you really do feel like a badass as you tear through an enemy fortress with your sword and bow. The overarching "try to become shogun" system that frames these mechanics works pretty well - boosting your stats makes the minigames easier, beating the minigames lets you boost your stats, making for a nice loop - but there are a couple of frustrating parts. Your lowest-ranked rival will basically do nothing except try to assassinate you over and over, and killing him just means his son takes over at the same low rank and you have the same problem. And while adventuring to seek honor and glory can be fun, once you're the top-ranked samurai you can't really do much to advance. Either you wait for the current leader to die (boring) or assassinate him to speed things along (risky). In short, the gameplay has some flaws, but the style and presentation might be enough to make you overlook them.
First of all, this game's graphics have aged very well. The lasers glow, the rockets fwoosh, the big ships slash through each other with massive beam cannons and spray flak and lasers everywhere. It still looks good after all these years, and there are texture packs online to improve it even more. All the races have a distinct style: The Terrans get standard blocky ships, the Vasudans get organic yellow curves, and the Shivans get scary twisted black and red. These graphics make it amazingly satisfying to dogfight or help out in a big capship battle. The gameplay is fairly straightforward: There's a nice variety of missions, from dogfighting to interception to escort, and they're all pretty fun. Dogfighting handles nicely since the game lets you automatically match speeds to stay on your enemy's tail, gives you a reticle to lead your target, and other helpful bits of information on your HUD. Dogfighting, chucking missiles around, divebombing a massive capship to demolish its beam cannons and give your own capitals a fighting chance, these are all tons of fun and the main reason I gave this game 4 stars. Unfortunately, the game's more advanced controls have more keys than a pipe organ. There's like 10 different targeting options, from "target the next enemy" to "target the ship subsystem under my reticle," each with its own key, your guns have different firing modes and that gets a few more keys, your throttle settings take up all your number keys and more to make adjustments, and you get miscellaneous keys for your flares, shield orientation, and so on. It's a mess. If you find you need to switch guns mid-battle, you'll definitely have to take your eyes off the screen for a while. Also, bomb interception is the most annoying game type ever invented. The idea is that when an enemy bomber tries to torpedo your capship, you can shoot down their bomb before it hits, then hunt down the bomber before they fire again. Unfortunately, bombs are hard to spot, so you don't always know when you should be running interception and when you should be hunting bombers (strike one). Then you need to press the "B" key to actually target the bomb, one of those many confusing keyboard commands I mentioned above (strike two), and bombs travel pretty fast so you usually won't intercept them in time, anyway (strike three!). I just gave up and let my wingmen handle it. So, beautiful graphics, varied gameplay, exciting dogfights, massive battleship duels, marred by messy controls and annoying bombers. Definitely worth getting, just be aware of these issues before you jump in.
