First thing's first, if you want to play a Samurai Warriors 4 family game on PC, SW:SoS is your only good option. The game engine got a lot of mileage; SW4, SW4-2, SWC3, SW4E, and finally SW:SoS. Of those, only SoS and 4-2 came to Steam, but 4-2 had an awful port and was a bit of a mess. SoS is a strong, solid port that refines the SW4 gameplay extremely well before Koei could go on to disappoint us in SW5. (I suppose WO4 counts technically and that is a really solid game too.)
Japan had the "Year of Yukimura Sanada" to celebrate their historical hero (This is what a REAL nation does. We could never have anything like that here, sadly.) and part of the bounty of that was this special version of Samurai Warriors with a musou style story almost entirely focused on the Sanada clan. The writing does a very good job of getting you into the nitty gritty of history and showing you how many different clans and factions in Warring States Japan spent the whole time playing backstabbing grand strategy games against each other IRL. Mixed with this writing are generally really solid musou levels with SW4's refined combat. They are smaller, but usually better paced and focused. The musou is standard, the hyper attacks that sweep hordes of mooks are still here; nerfed a bit but not terribly overpowered. Enemy high morale zones are here too (which cause all the enemies to have hyper armor), but you can usually (but not always) disable them by finding flagbearer soldiers and taking them out. And if you can't, you are trying to cheat the map and not do the objectives anyway. Thankfully the problem of enemy soldiers teching out of air combos from 4-2 is mostly gone, and apart from hyper-armor being the game's main trick in any tough content, the combat remains really satisfying. Some of the levels do a great job telling stories too: The scramble to try to escape from the Takeda cavalry's disastrous defeat is played out as a fairly immersive level.
Still, some of the levels have a few goofy gimmicks. Crappy stealth sections, talking waiting for doors to open and objectives to trigger. Most of the downtime in the game is spent running around hubs talking to people and doing terrible farming and fishing minigames and the rest is spent doing "Exploration" where you run through MonHun style open world zones doing all the MonHun stuff that isn't hunting monsters: So basically collecting shiny crap. The shiny crap goes into upgrades. You can just farm upgrades and directly upgrade any character's weapon to +99 ATK and +99 Atk Speed whenever you want if you are patient enough. These segments are thankfully NOT terrible, only mediocre; they mercifully do not go full MonHun and just allow you to grab shinies running over them rather than do some dumb button mash minigame to collect them, but the story likes to force you to keep doing them over and over and over whenever it wants to pad the play time and they never get fun.
The story is both good and bad: While you get very intimate with the drama of the times, a lot of the attempts to map it onto Samurai Warriors fall flat. Yukimura's dad Masayuki just turns from devoted soldier to inscrutable hyper-strategist with no explanation, but at least he has a great moveset. Ieyasu's son is a sarcastic jerk but most of his sarcasm is rightly lambasting the other Koei comedy caricatures being forced by the plot to act mean and violent to make some of these wars happen. Chacha and Sasuke, two of the other new characters, are some of the worst characters Samurai Warriors has ever written, worse than the Kemari clown easily. SW already has several tragic heroines and Chacha gets to out Mary Sue them all, being so constantly abrasive and rude to everyone, yet loved by everyone, that she sounds like a character from an American movie. And she is pit as Yukimura's pseudo-love interest for some stupid reason despite being obnoxious, unlikeable, and constantly icily cold to him. She isn't even slightly tsundere, she is just horrific, but the story will drag to a halt when they want Yukimura and her to hang out a lot. Worse still, her moveset is atrocious completely unusable on any difficulty without a lot of AtkSpeed boosts, but not as bad as Sasuke who can barely be told to hit the enemies in front of him. This guy takes the sarcastic and edgy to 11 the same way Chacha took her worst quantities to 11, and he just does not feel like a Samurai Warriors character but some punk who isekaied into a world where everyone is noble and bold so he could insult everyone but never make them mad. Some of the narrative flourishes fall flat, EVERYONE has the same arc of "resolve resolve resolve," which is understandable as the history and Koei-style characterization overlap to a really difficult combo to tell a story with.
Unfortunately, being story focused, there isn't a real endgame to SW:SoS. You can unlock more heroes and farm more mats to buy more upgrades for their weapons, but all you can do with that is free play on previous maps (Not even the final map! They do not even offer a post-game all clear or NG+ save with free mode! What a rush job!) on the highest difficulty, but beyond that there is not much to grind for. Any serious growth of heroes you did not use through the story is going to require dozens of hours of adventure mode farming or far more economical usage of cheat engine. Mercifully, since you can simply buy weapon upgrades directly, it is the easiest SW4 family game upgrade system to cheat; simply give yourself infinite money and infinite clan experience and you can make everyone ready for battle. SW4's combat system is fun enough and the levels worth replaying are good enough that you could enjoy this game both as a one-and-done affair and as your best dose of the SW4 gameplay provided you could stomach or cheat through the enormous grind, but above all it is meant to be a Sanada clan story and despite some aspects of it missing the mark and some of the attempts to add RPG stuff being time wasting trash, it is a really solid product at that.
