Medieval II: Total War

The Good
The battles are really massive and it's easily the most awesome-to-watch RTS out there. I just love to send thousands of soldiers into combat, the swords clashing, burning arrows flying and the sound of my crying processor backing it all up. Simple fights can vary from anywhere between 600 to 8000 sprites on the screen which all have randomized bodies and faces and carry banners. It is rare to see a game that is both interesting to play and also interesting to watch.

The game has a lot of depth to it, more so than any other strategy game I have ran into thus far. Not only do you have to manage your economy and soldiers, but you also need to keep different factions happy, most notably the pope. You also have to go into discussion with different nations and the tech tree is not as mapped out as it was in Civ games. I am pretty sure that the fact that you have to manage every single city this way will appeal to the most hardcore of the RTS fans, for me it was personally quite a novelty, but it did get overwhelming later on.

As far as I know the game is very historically accurate which is always a plus for me. I was pretty surprised when the tutorial battle had me fighting the Saxons because I am a descendant of Saxons myself. I haven't really done any research, but the fact that characters age and seem to die at fixed moments in the plot suggests to me that Creative Assembly went through quite a bit of research to get all these details which feels like a treat to me.

The Bad
After playing the Hyrule: Total War mod for a while (which lacks a campaign mode) I decided to try the real stuff out for once and go into the Grand Campaign, however this proved to be an overwhelming disaster from start to finish. My first problem was with the cities and upgrading the buildings because I couldn't for the love of god wrap my mind around all the damn effects. It was several hours in that I realized you must either have a city or a castle because I had been investing money on developing several of my dozens of cities and the option to upgrade these two came up quite often. Aside from that I often ran into the situation where I could spend an entire hour pouring resources into a city and still not been able to recruit any halfway decent units from the place.

I was already disappointed before I even started playing the Grand Campaign, I happen to know there are quite a lot of nations out there in the world, so why the hell can you only play as eight of them? I wasn't expecting to be able to play as the Saxons, but where the hell were countries like Russia or the Viking lands? Given, you can go there and take over the countries, but that doesn't make you the country for the same reason standing in an opening doesn't technically make me a door.

After playing as England for a while I decided to go for the main goal: I had to rule over fifteen regions and eliminate France and Scotland. Scotland proved rather easy a target, but when I took it to France and took out three cities at once, suddenly half the world was up in arms against me and even the damn pope suddenly reduced me from level 9 to level 1 on his friendship scale to the point he was very close to throwing a crusade into my direction. I managed to hold off, but when I couldn't find a single city that got fetch me a diplomat and the Danes suddenly joined the fray, I decided to quite and try the Roman empire for once... To cut it short: The game saved me the effort and just started me out in a war with four factions.

An alternative to managing each city on your own is "auto manage" which will have the AI do all the work for you while you just give it some general pointers (such as focus on financial or focus on military), but the AI is beyond stupid and would often just sit there and do absolutely nothing. I swear I was ten turns further and it hadn't given out a single construction or recruitment order, it did nothing. However, the rival AI is strong as shit, so I had to do every fight by looking at the size of our armies and do the auto-battle. During the Roman Empire attempt I mentioned earlier I had to fight against Venice which only had one city, but I lost count of how many times I mustered a huge force and slaughtered my way to their city, they just kept producing more generals and more armies despite having no access to resources whatsoever.

After every turn you get a whole post office full of messages dumped on your screen about recent developments and some of these were just pointless. One thing they would throw me to death with was marriage requests, but the problem is that unless they offer you a man, you will get a princess who pretty much acts as a diplomat, but why would you want to sacrifice one of your generals in trade for a diplomat you can also recruit, while you are been attacked almost all the time before you can even raise a single sword at an enemy.

During the few diplomatic meetings I managed to get into I did very well, but the results were always impossible to notice afterwards. I often went for trade rights or map information, but I never noticed my economy growing or the map changing at all. I also managed to ally myself with some other empire, but when the time was there they were nowhere to be found. My favorite moment was by far when the pope told me to stop attacking the French for a few turns, but apparently the message wasn't send to both parties, so I had half of France on my doorstep while I wasn't allowed to raise a single finger.

The Bottom Line
Medieval II: Total War seems like every RTS-fan's dream to me, but personally I found it to be very unclear and overwhelming. I did the tutorial, I read most of the text, all I didn't do was listen to the annoying hints because the few useful ones were burried beneath endless streams of instructions on how to walk. This game would just be infinitely better if it would just get right down to business, I don't need to know the history behind dirt paths, just tell me exactly what it increases or decreases and stop calling it trade, does trade refer to the economy? If yes than call it economy. Does a faction not agree to a proposal? Let me ask them what they would need to make the deal work anyway.

If you are a big history fan or if you are big on RTS games then this is likely the game for you. In case you are looking for something a lot lighter I can recommend Battle for Middle-Eart II or the Civ games, but not this. Also, for the Zelda fans: Get your hands on Hyrule: Total War, they won't let me add it to the database, but it's a thousand times better than half the other games on here ;).