The goal in Takeda is fairly simple: lead your army to victory and conquer all of your opponents. In order to do this, you'll need to direct your generals and their troops in various missions against several of the warlords in Japan. You assume the role of the leader of the Takeda clan, and it's rise to dominance in Japan. Over the course of the game, you'll have to decide which clans to go after, and which ones you can let lie until you've taken care of other business.

When you first start the game - and after each mission - you are given a nice overhead map of the entire region. From here you can choose which forces to attack next, or you can choose to lay dormant and allow your troops to rest and recruit new members. Once you have selected your next mission, you'll need to prepare for the battle ahead. Here you can choose the formation of your army for the upcoming conflict, everything from arranging where your generals will be located to their battle formations are all available for you to change. Some of the formations are pretty basic in nature, and look fairly simple to use, while others are extravagant and complex. After choosing your formations, you can choose what types of troops you wish to bring into battle, which are sorted according to what general they receive orders from. These soldiers can range from horse mounted soldiers to archers, and later on, gunmen.

While being able to change your battle formations before and during battle is nice and all, I can't help but feel that they really don't do anything during battle. Once one portion of your troops locate an enemy encampment, the troops in a division pretty much break ranks and it degenerates into a blurry mess on the screen. What's worse is that there's really no way to get them back into formation save for stopping all action and then commanding your troops into the formation you desire.

But make no mistake about it though, at times Takeda can be pretty fun to play. The battles feature hundreds of troops on either side duking it out, and seem epic in proportions. The main problem is that you don't really feel like anything you've done to prepare for battle had any affect on the actual battle whatsoever. All of the battles are pretty much the same formula: attack outside forces, break into stronghold, win battle. There isn't too much creativity in what you need to accomplish in the game, and as such, it can get extremely repetitive within a couple of hours; what's worse is that getting into the stronghold is one of the toughest parts of the game. It's not that it's hard to break down the troops inside, it's the action of getting all of your troops inside is what's hard. It seems your soldiers have quite a hard time fitting themselves into a huge gate without getting caught up in each other. The worse part is that many tactics you could be using in the game seem to be totally irrelevant: At one point I had my main group of soldiers waiting to flank my enemy while decoys were sent out to distract them... unfortunately that didn't happen, since one single troop met with my main army, which sent his entire army hurtling towards me.

What makes this worse is that the game is at such a high resolution that all of the soldiers on screen look like tiny dots, and it can be really hard to decipher which ones are the most important (the generals) and which ones aren't. I feel that it just makes combat even more frustrating when you can't clearly see what exactly is happening on the battlefield. It's also sad that you can't actually change this resolution either, so you're pretty much stuck with it. Overall the graphics and the sound are pretty much standard. there's nothing that makes them stand out, but they're not especially terrible in any respect.

In the end, Takeda is a game that aspires to be a lot better than what it actually is. There just isn't enough good points to warrant a purchase of the gae, and while the faults that the game has are few, they are extremely important in making a good strategy game terrific. If you're one that likes a game that's flavoured with a ton of Feudal Japan history, Takeda would make a decent purchase for you, but if you want something that's fun, I'd recommend a game like Sid Meier's Gettysburg.

· · · Reno