Medieval II – Total War : 8.8

As you can see from my last review, I am an AVID Total War fan. So I love this game. It is AMAZING. Yes, I know that is what I said for Rome, but Total War games just are. Nothing can compare to them, except perhaps war itself, and in that you can get hurt, so Total War is probably your best bet. And what a bet that is...

This game is like Rome but better. Fact. The campaign map has been updated (America, watch out!) and new features have been added, such as movies (lots of different ones) for when your agents (be they spies, assasins or even princesses) carry out missions. ( In Rome you were just told what had happened - now you see it happening!). There is also a Merchant agent who can gather money by standing on rescources on the campaign map. A big change is that there are two types of cities now, and settlements can be converted between the two. Cities can train good infantry units and artillery as well, along with agents, but are more focused on money making than militarism. Castles have a fixed tax rate but can train calvary and archers as well and have better defences.

Well...They had better defences...

Deplomacy in this game is far harder than in Rome, especially if you are a European, Catholic faction when you have to deal with the Pope. He belongs to an (unplayable)  faction called the Papal States, which can never be defeated and starts off with Rome. If you attack another Catholic faction, the Pope will probably not like this (unless he came from your faction originally - priests get promoted) and therefore will excommunicate you, making your god-fearing subjects upset and all of Christendom out to get you. This can be quite fun...

But really, this is not why you buy Total War games is it? You want the battles, don't you? Well, the battle engine has got a revamp that makes it far FAR more realistic, though to run it on "huge" unit size you will need a pretty good (Dual-Core?) PC. No longer do your soldiers all attack in exactly the same way, hitting the air about 3 feet in front of the enemy and killing them (making them die all in the same way). No. All the soldiers have little mini battles of their own, cutting and parrying and sticking their swords through people, all the while getting more and more bloody. As well as this, amazingly for a strategy game,This makes battles far more immersing. Fire and flame effects look much better too, and that brings me on to the best invention - gunpowder. Though cannons are not as fun as trebuchets (which can throw cows at people - no, really, they can!), they can destroy castle walls easily and musket- and arquebusiers are fun too. All in all, this is better than Rome too.

Then why, I hear you cry, do you give this so-called better game a lower score? Well, like all Total War games, the AI lets it down, more so than in Rome - there is more to go wrong. So often, archers charge holding their bows rather than their swords, cavalry do not bother charging at all sometimes - they just walk into the enemy - and countless other little things go wrong. Also, because of the realism of the battles, they often take much longer, without the fluidity found in Rome - units also take longer to break. The more realistic unit deesigns make units of your own factoin harder to see, even with the banners.

But these are just a few tiny niggles that really are just a tiny sopt on the gargantuan elephant of strategy games that is Total War .

Nometet.com says 88%

+Awe inspiring graphics

+Incredible scale

+Immense replayability

-Amazing graphics can sometimes slow it down

-Lacks fluidity of Rome