Creative Assembly heads back to the familiar territory of sword swinging knights with Medieval II: Total War. This “sequel” is mainly an impressive graphics update with a few new rules thrown in for good measure; still, fans of Rome: Total War longing to use that same style of play in Medieval Europe, letting loose arrows with Welsh Longbowmen rather than attacking with Roman Legions won’t be disappointed.
The most obvious change from the 2002 release of the original Medieval: Total War is the graphics package. The real-time battles, as you'd expect, look fantastic. The units themselves carry a lot more detail, and if you zoom in you can see that each soldier looks like an individual and not a clone, sort of in the same way that the game Mark of Chaos handles it. Uniforms get dirty and splattered with blood – even the grass looks better. Granted, it's really hard to control an army when you're zoomed in looking at blood stains, but the battles look sharp and detailed when zoomed out and in 'command view'; there are a lot more animations from how the soldiers swing a sword to the movement of the cavalry; it's a significant increase in the detail from Rome: Total War, despite the fact that you need either a very fast PC or a high grade video card to see it in its full glory.
The game just doesn’t look good but it also plays well, which shouldn’t come as a surprise since Creative Assembly has really had time to refine its design with the Total War games. All of the usual trappings are here: flanking, morale, leadership abilities, slope effects, you name it. The biggest issue with the battles is the speed. Things tend to move a little too fast and while there is a speed control that allows you to bump up the speed in mop-up time, there is no way in which to slow it down to allow you time to make on the fly adjustments during a huge battle. You are almost required to learn the hotkeys in order to control a large army if you want it to perform to its full potential. It’s not that it plays like a blazing fast RTS like Dawn of War, but for a game that requires you to command umpteen formations at once, a slow down slider would have been a welcome addition.
While the game has multiplayer battle support and one-off scenarios, clearly the meat is the Grand Campaign which starts in 1080 AD and puts you in charge of England, France, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, or Venice up through the year 1530 (if you survive that long). The frustrating part is that there are 21 nations in all, and only these five are available at the outset; you need to win a “short” campaign to unlock other nations. The short campaign asks that you control 15 territories while wiping out a specific empire. If you're playing Venice, for instance, you need to control 15 territories, while also conquering the Byzantines and Milan in order to win. So these “short” campaigns take hours to complete. For a PC game to do this is utterly ridiculous – you bought the game, you should have access to the full Campaign options right from the get go.
There are a few new wrinkles on the turn-based campaign map. You need to decide what you want each territory to be in terms of either providing an economic boost or being a military HQ. If you build a castle, you have access to more military units and can keep your people in line with greater efficiency, but you won't make as much money in that territory. Conversely, by building a town, you'll make more loot but will lack the ability hire advanced units. It’s a nice balancing act that the game forces you to navigate. The campaign's end game now includes the conquering of the Americas, which is really a radical shift in scope to what was already a huge game. This feels a bit tacked on and you only get a very small slice of America, but it does add some extra flavor to the final portion of the campaign.
Another area where the game has improved, at least in its options, is diplomacy and the use of the princess unit. In the original, diplomacy was pretty bare bones stuff and the princesses were next to useless as far as being an active participant in your realm and not just a brood mare for the state. There are a slew of diplomatic options now and you can offer and counter-offer with a foreign diplomat from things as basic as "attack my enemy" to other possibilities like selling off a princess to help form an alliance. The princess has a "charm" rating which is both a measure of her sheer beauty as well as her ability to charm the socks off of a foreign leader. The princess can now marry foreign generals, which can in turn (potentially) bring him into your empire as a faction heir if his loyalty rating is high enough. They won't automatically take the princess into their empire and this is a great way to add potential heirs. Of course the AI controlled princess units can do the same, so seeing a French princess wandering around London is now a reason to be concerned.
Merchant units also play a unique role. You can see specific goods sitting on the campaign map and merchants have the ability to form a monopoly on the item, thus giving your economy a nice boost. In addition, these merchants can try to seize other faction's goods – they can even fight on the map over these items (the fights are auto-resolved). Other agents include priests, cardinals, spies, and diplomats, each with their own specific ratings and abilities.
Religion has to play a significant role in any game set in the Middle Ages and Medieval II is no exception. From dealing with The Pope, to fending off Inquisitors and going through the period of The Crusades, you'll always have an eye on the religious factions in the game. You even need to watch out and make sure your priests don't lose their way and turn into full blown heretics. The Pope won't care for that. There’s even a new election after the Pope dies so it pays to have a respected Cardinal at the ready. Still, priests do too good of a job in converting a populace and since they are so cheap to build, you can just crank out an army of them and get the people in line with your faith.
