Reviewed: January 3, 2007
Reviewed by: Jeff Gedgaud

Publisher
SEGA

Developer
Creative Assembly

Released: November 13, 2006
Genre: Strategy
Players: 1-8
ESRB: Teen

9
8
7
10
8.8

System Requirements

Medieval: Total War came out in 2002 and now Sega as well as Creative Assembly continue to improve and expand your strategy adventure. Medieval II: Total War brings the Middle Ages warfare in real time battle as well as turn based empire building for another round in this much improved strategy game.

The empire-building portion of Medieval II has you building your empire one gold piece at a time. You build your cities and try to please your people while trading with neighboring countries as well as accomplishing missions that the game gives you from time to time.

City building is a simple affair of picking which new buildings or improvements to add or you can let the computer auto manage all these aspects. You also get to recruit from each city to create new units for your existing armies or start new ones.

The game puts in a unique gameplay twist by having several sources of different mission assignments to earn money like attacking rebel hideouts. These missions can be assigned from the Pope or a council of Nobles or other country nobles asking for your help. This is a unique way to assign a mission that brings a more believable way to assign tasks for you to complete.

During gameplay you will also have things like spies, diplomats and marriage proposals from other countries as well as your own country to deal with. The hardest part of the empire building is earning enough money to build your cities so every mission becomes a race to earn gold.

Using religion and diplomacy you get to try your hand at all kinds of neat things like building your empire through becoming the Pope. They have a system to have a chosen character of yours elected pope but it takes a lot of setup and planning to pull it off. But if you do, oh the joy of having both the religious and ruling might of your kingdom.

There is a lot of gameplay in Medieval II with the diplomacy and other areas of non-combat with the empire building. Not only do you have the usual spies and emissaries that trade with foreign countries but you can make use of princesses to marry into other countries favor. Each of the characters both battle figures and agents as they call them are playable characters that can gain a following or be hated by the masses and be used in your empire building in many ways.

For your real time combat you have the battles that occur during your reign in the campaign or several quick and historical battles to duke it out with any country in the game. The country you choose for either the empire building in campaign mode or quick battles will determine the units available to you. Units can range from the huge variety of armed and armored foot and horse soldiers to special units like elephants, cannons and other large siege weapons.

The units in the battles are controlled as a whole squad of fighting men with each unit being easily identifiable. The main problem you have in battles is the speed with which things occur and moving units to accomplish what you want them to. Using a good variety of units and choosing the correct ones at the start for many possible situations is hard but the way to win the battles.

You need to think ahead and prepare for what the enemy is going to do or you will be caught with units like archers facing a horde of charging cavalry with no other protection but their bows. At other times you can accurately predict what the enemy will do and have the charging cavalry face the cannons you positioned in front of the town street they charge down backed up by cavalry of your own.

The battles are well fought out by the AI with a good variety of tactics that the computer throws at you. Your own tactics will be determined by the units you select or can afford during your quick battles. Yes you have to purchase them before you fight in the quick combat scenarios but in the historic and campaign battles you get either what you built up in your strategy levels of the campaign or what was really there for the historical.

Multiplayer games consist of battles against other people online but without the empire building. This means you can have fierce battles between up to eight armies played out right over your Internet. The competition is great using your varied armies and you get to decide things during the setup like custom, historical or balanced battles. Multiplayer is played over the Gamespy network or a LAN you set up.

Using the interface and mouse keyboard assignments was very easy and the more you play of these strategy genre games the more you can see the simplest setups are the best. The mouse commands and moving around the screen is quick and easy and getting all your troops to do the things you want is simple.

The troops may not be doing the right thing but they are doing what you told them to and that is the whole point of all this strategy, to make sure you have the easiest and best way to accomplish what you want. Sega and Creative Assembly have come up with a very easy and nice setup not only with the interface but the entire game that works very well in all the different areas. The gameplay as a whole works very well and they should know after all the Total War and other strategy games they have successfully designed and published.

The individual people and great looks to the graphics make the empire building portion of the game a real treat and just add to the overall enjoyment of Medieval II. During the empire building your emissaries and other characters will be rather large so it is easy for you to tell who is who on the map.

In Medieval II you don’t need to be getting that close a look at any one person though as you will want to concentrate on the bigger picture. It is fun from time to time to zoom in for a close look at some of the fighting though. The graphics for the buildings, textures and cut scenes all look very good with no glitching or problems.

The graphics have a good variety of settings to enhance the gameplay or graphics for your system but to really enjoy the intense and large scale battles you will want to have a higher end system to play on. I noticed some slow down and loss of frame rates when the action heated up especially if I choose to have more units in large battles.

There were some very good music and theme sounds that added very well to the general feel of the medieval times and again just made the game a well-rounded and enjoyable strategy experience. Medieval II had some pretty decent background noises and the sound effects during the battles were realistic with the noticeable change depending on how close to the action the camera was.

The sound settings are the usual volume controls for the sound effects, voices and background sounds. There is also a setting for which hardware device is used by the game for your audio as well as a setting to include the subtitles to what the narrator or others are saying in game.

The empire building along with all the battles that you will no doubt end up in will take much longer and I can see changing tactics and retrying areas from saved games as a common occurrence. There is enough here to keep any strategy enthusiast busy for months without any of the gameplay getting repetitive or boring. Who doesn’t like to try their hand at a castle siege with new cannons and old sword fighting?

I can’t imagine much of a better game coming out for strategy enthusiast but I am sure that the Total War series will definitely try to continue in this same vein of well-made games.