Nobunaga's Ambition: Awakening by developer Koei Tecmo and publisher Koei Tecmo Games—Sony PlayStation 4 review written by Nick with a copy provided by the publisher.
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes.
Nobunaga's Ambition: Awakening is the latest entry in the
Koei Tecmo family of historical simulations. This title is a repackaging of the
release on PC from last summer, and while the premise will provide little new
to fans of the series, this is a deeply engrossing war strategy that I found
very difficult to put down.
So, a bit about me to explain why I am pretty much the
target audience for these titles. I’ve been hooked on these games since I first
played the original Nobunaga's Ambition on the NES back in the late 80’s. This
series has been around for a long time now, and I’ve played the majority of the
releases that have landed here in North America. The series has seen numerous
changes over the years, adding customization, shifting from turn-based combat to
a more RTS style and plenty more. Often times this series is mentally handcuffed
to the Romance of the Three Kingdoms games that Koei Tecmo has been releasing
for decades as well (which I last played in 2021 and it had an expansion pack -
I reviewed
it in 2021 here).
This means I’m by no means a new user to the series, and can
find my way around pretty well. I am familiar with the major players, much of the history and despite the tweaks and changes that come with each iteration, I am very comfortable with the series as a whole.
The game attempts to hold your hand when you start playing, but these are dense
games as a rule and Nobunaga's Ambition: Awakening is no exception. The first
hour or two is largely spent going through menus, with gobs of text thrown your
way. After the first half dozen or so, an impatient gamer might start mashing
the button to move forward without fully digesting the content, but I would
very strongly advise against doing so. Sure, you can learn quite a bit about
the nuances of the title through ‘doing’, but there will be a lot of trial and
error, with numerous errors if you do so.
At its heart, you are tasked with unifying Japan through economic,
diplomatic and war-like means. Much of this is done through micromanagement,
though some of that heavy lifting that used to be so time-consuming in older
versions of the game is offloaded onto your subordinates. It helps that there
are a lot of options available at the start of the game, from various difficulty
settings like AI aggression, resource availability and how historically
accurate you want things to be (like female generals or shaking up where
generals start). There’s also a ton of jumping-in points. You can start at the
beginning, but you can also find numerous spots in the timeline that revolve
around big events and serve as alternate entry points.
Once you move past the growing pains of numerous settings
and introductory segments, Nobunaga's Ambition: Awakening really starts to move
along nicely. It helps that while the game was released on PC first, Nobunaga's
Ambition: Awakening handles really well with a controller. That is not always
the case (you can look to my recent Strategic Mind review for an example of
where an unintuitive interface and control scheme can be major hurdles). This
is a very menu-heavy game, but once I got used to navigating them, issuing
commands became a very smooth process.
One of the most interesting aspects of Nobunaga's Ambition:
Awakening is the wide cast of characters. The leaders take center stage (the
game is named for one, after all), but the numerous subordinates can become
leaders. They have a loyalty stat that can cause them to switch sides or stand with
a leader through trying times. Obviously more talented individuals will draw
greater interest – and help turn the tides. They can gather greater resources,
help an area develop more quickly, sway others during negotiations and of
course during the all-important wars, these generals often make more of a
difference in the results than just the sheer number of ‘regular’ troops
assigned to them. Therefore, gaining and retaining talented generals is
paramount. A nice feature found in Nobunaga's Ambition: Awakening is the
ability to create your own subordinate characters that can be encountered while
playing as well, and it’s a deep customization process.
From a presentation standpoint, Nobunaga's Ambition:
Awakening is excellent. I appreciate that the series has English voice acting
for its many engaging cutscenes that occur. Even though I prefer having English
voice acting, some past releases had both English and Japanese, but the Japanese
voice pack is curiously missing and might be off-putting for some people. The
maps look quite attractive from a high view and also when you drill down into
villages or battles up close and personal. It’s a smooth framerate, though I
could grumble a bit about how it’s been designed for PS4 and not PS5 and as a
result lacks some of the horsepower to push a higher resolution. It can be a
smidge challenging to make out visual details during combat, but it gets the
job done well enough. On the audio side, the aforementioned voice acting is
generally pretty solid and I thoroughly enjoyed the music.
One of the aspects of Nobunaga's Ambition: Awakening that
could be divisive is how the subordinates handle so much of the little stuff. I
could see veterans of the series preferring the heavy micromanagement that came
with Sphere of Influence. It was a longer, deeper but also slower process. I
for one appreciate the attempt to try and add some automation in there to simplify
life. Is it better? I don’t know – personally I can see both sides of the
debate, but appreciate the quality of life improvements that the game provides –
including this aspect.
Admittedly, I am the target audience for Nobunaga's
Ambition: Awakening, which could be a niche title for many. I love the setting
and appreciate how well the team has adapted what was a PC release for the PS4.
The controls feel good and the menus while numerous, are certainly manageable.
There is still plenty of deep strategy to be found here, but streamlined
gameplay means you will spend more time seeing the results of your decisions
and less time tinkering with each and every little detail behind the scenes.
The overall presentation is good, though the lacking Japanese voice talent and
somewhat muddled combat visuals do take a bit of the shine off. Overall I highly recommend
Nobunaga's Ambition: Awakening for strategy fans, as it is a great example of
how to do strategy gaming on a console.
Score: 8.5 / 10
