Medieval II: Total War (PC DVD)

Please: this is a health warning. I love this game. But after a Jekyll and Hyde existence, 6 months of deep escapism by night and red-eyed anguish by day, I have just got my girlfriend to give it to the charity shop. It is (or, I should say, was) just too good. Fantastic fun: at your feet lies the broad sweep of Europe, waiting for the imprint of your merchant's boot, receptive to your weasly diplomacy, unsuspecting of your dastardly spies and assassins... You choose the colour of your kingdom: pious, treacherous, mercenary, aggressive. You cultivate an entire dynasty of royals, generals and cardinals. And yet... this is only half the game!
Before long, even if you are the saintliest ruler, you will be dragged into war. And then the flipside of the fun emerges. Here, instead of measured diplomacy and plodding priests, we have the thrill of charging knights, the grinding march of infantry, death-at-a-distance dispensed by archers.
The Total War series is a masterly marriage of the strategic and the tactical. You must pick your way through the bludgeoning battles while administering your empire with a deft and subtle touch and a nose for trouble.
All this adds up to a quite wonderful game (and I haven't even mentioned the pope, crusades, princesses, navies, the Mongol invasion, bribery, the many factions, the voyage to the new world, and so much more...). But it goes on and on, and so addictively! I found it quite impossible to stop playing, and indeed to stop thinking about how to further my empire's borders. Hence my miserly allocation of only four stars instead of the well-deserved five: that blank star represents many, many lost hours. Don't buy this game unless you have a spare life to spend. Spare me a thought as I go cold turkey...

As with most Total War veterans I've been waiting for the release of this game with some anticipation. I won't go into the quality of the game, other reviewers have taken care of that, and any criticism of Medieval 2 as a game is churlish. However, and this is quite a big however, beware the minimum system specifications! I built my computer (on a budget) ostensibly to play Rome TW (amongst other things), approx 12 months ago, and it handled everything the game could throw at it. AMD 64 3200, 1Gb dual channel RAM, 256 Mb PCI express graphics card, etc. When I first started using Medieval 2 on the above machine battlefield movements were at best `clunky' and the response time was rather slow, and frustrating. Perhaps I'd been spoiled by being able to play Rome at its top setting seamlessly. After some research on the web, it would appear that all TW games are usually memory intensive, Medieval 2 being no exception, and therefore the greediest. Anyway I've whacked on another 1Gb of dual channel memory (so four banks of 512K), and it now works beautifully. Unless you have at least 1Gb of memory I wouldn't even bother with Medieval 2, you'll have more fun playing the previous TW games. I hope this helps any potential purchasers...

I've been a big fan of the Total War series since its first release, "Shogun", a fair few years back. Medieval Total War 2 (MTW2) is the latest in the series and rather than move to a different period, is actually a further development of the previous game Medieval Total War. The most recent entry, Rome:Total War was one of the best games of all time, hands down. Read its reviews (and if you haven't played it please do!!!) to see why. The rest of this review is aimed at gamers who know the series quite well; if you've never played a total war game I would go and get Rome first, and come back to this one later on or if you are really interested in the time period.

MTW2 feels to me like it is version 1.5 of the original MTW rather than a whole new game in itself. Yes the graphics are improved, and yes there are some neat units out there. But really the game dynamics have changed very little indeed and there are still some underlying flaws which haven't been addressed since the first installment.

The first issue is enemy AI on the battlefield. Enemy spearmen are quite happy to stand there getting pelted with arrows when if they only charged you, you'd be ripped to shreds. Unless the computer has a sheer weight of units to use against you, you can usually defeat it on "medium" difficulty. So far as I can tell, increasing the difficulty just makes the AI's troops harder to kill, it doesn't make it particularly sneaky. This sense that you are just playing against a computer and not a devious general takes away from your sense of immersion and reminds you that you are just going through a routine, which in my view detracts from the experience.

The second issue is one that is not unique to Total War by any means; the game is totally indecipherable without buying either an expensive (and usually poorly written) strategy guide, or reading one of the excellent FAQ documents you can find online (GameFAQs is a good place to start). As game boxes get smaller, manuals are becoming thin and flimsy with very little info on how to play the game. If you are not an experienced Total Warrer I think you would get quite frustrated playing this. The in-game "advisors" are as useless as ever, chiming in with repetitive reminders of what a spy does every time you click on one, but never actually giving you relevant, timely, specific advice.

That's enough of the negatives, let's move on now to some of the positives. One of the major ways in which this game is an improvement upon the first MTW is that managing your faction and your settlements is a lot less fiddly and prone to frustration. In the original MTW you only had to turn your back on a settlement for five minutes and they'd be revolting, forming a new faction, and generally needing massive troops garissoned there to keep a lid on things. In MTW2 your population is a LOT more forgiving and you are provided with several buildings which increase happiness by big chunks. That means less elite units stuck behind your castle walls filing their nails and more action out on the battlefield.

The religion system has also been streamlined and the relationship with the Pope works very well in my view. I have yet to play as a Muslim faction but the crusades, papal elections, and need to purge the heretics is a fun thread of the game that doesn't become too frustrating.

There is a welcome return to the fun in-game movies that appeared whenever your assassin attempts a mission, and even better once you've seen a movie you can opt not to see that type of movie again. My favourites are still the "geisha" assassin from the original Shogun: Total War and I wouldn't mind seeing a remake of that game too!

If I could give a couple of little tips to those about to embark on a campaign:

- Trade will make you more money than farming ever will. Only improve farming twice, then switch to trade buildings otherwise your cities will overpopulate.

- Merchants aren't worth it unless you're sitting on a resource making >100 gold per turn

- Specialise castles to produce troops, don't try and make every settlement a "jack of all trades and a master of none"

- Keep the Pope happy.

- When assaulting a castle, blow the gates down with catapults or cannons.

All in all then a worthwhile addition to the series and a good piece of workmanship. It takes some of the splinters out of the origial MTW but doesn't really advance the series forwards very much. Apparently there's an all-new era to be tackled in the next installment, I for one will be looking forwad to it!