Total War: SHOGUN 2
BANGER · Strategy · 2011
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
BUY IT.
A BANGER at $8.99.
- Length
- 27.5h
- Value
- $0.33/hr
- Reviews
- 92% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 1 GB of memory, 256 MB DirectX 9.0c compatible card (shader model 3), 32 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
Total War: SHOGUN 2 is the perfect mix of real-time and turn-based strategy gaming for newcomers and veterans alike.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
It has never been cheaper than $2.99. That was June 2024. It has been discounted 74 times in the 14 years tracked here, typically at 75 percent off, with about 8 weeks between sales. Today's $8.99 at 70 percent off still sits 201 percent above the floor, so a deeper cut exists in its history.
Value puts it in the top 1 percent of the games it competes with. It is pricier than 97 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 97 percent. The nearest things to it, Total War: NAPOLEON – Definitive Edition ($19.99, scores 56) and Total War: EMPIRE – Definitive Edition ($19.99, scores 84), are both worse buys on this math.
Of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 3 come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written April 2024 to August 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 59 percent of the 1,366 reviews written there were positive, against 92 percent overall, and those are 4 percent of everything written about it.
27.5 hours to finish it, 216 to exhaust it. The completionist tail is 7.9 times the campaign.
What players say
I bought this game to conquer feudal Japan. Instead, feudal Japan conquered me. 10/10, would sell my katana collection (that I now own) again.
I really like the game but I have one complaint, the modding experience genuinely sucks. The mod manager barely explains load order, conflicts, dependencies, or why a mod is marked as outdated. You add one or two mods, launch the game through five different menus, select DirectX 11, and then the game immediately closes with no error message. Was it the new mod? The load order? A conflict? An outdated mod? Who knows...
The last good Total War, the precipice from which the entire franchise fell. Rome 2 was a nail in a coffin, Three Kingdoms was a mass grave, and the Warhammer series was an ossuary. Total War is long dead and this game contains the last bones worth observing.
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: achievement curve (Steam global achievements).
Cite this score
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Total War: SHOGUN 2 scores 86/100 on the BANG Score (a BANGER). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/201270/total-war-shogun-2The BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Aug 1, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.