Score: 8.4
Developer: Creative Assembly
I've been quite busy with a new job, and therefore, had no time for posting, or much of anything. Prior to starting said job though, I played this game for hours upon hours. Though it's now ancient as far as video (especially PC) games go, we are not all lucky enough to own a high-end video card (or even a system that's capable of holding one of these cards). But despite its age, it's still a high-quality turn-based/real-time strategy game, with enough interesting tidbits in both genres that it was engaging throughout the entire experience.
The main appeal is obviously the huge, far-more realistic real-time battles between massive (though not massive enough) medieval armies, which does challenge the gamer to utilize all the tactics the real players of that age had to use in order to vie for power in those rather troubling times. I can't recall the number of times I cried upon seeing an enemy camped out on the highest part of a mountain, with hundreds of archers just waiting to rain down death upon my own troops. Though not impossible, situations such as these make one think twice of engaging an enemy at all, a situation that simply doesn't exist on many RTS games out there, including the motherlode of arcade strategy, Starcraft. In the rock-paper-scissor systems those type of games inevitably end up using (though Starcraft II looks promising), there's always an alternative. There is in this game too (cavalry is good against archers and infantry, spearmen are good against cavalry, and infantry are good against spearmen), but inevitably it's the true-to-life things which a general can't control, like the weather, morale, and terrain, that dictate much of who wins and who loses. That is a great take and it adds so much to the realism and ethos of the game: it literally places you in the positions that a leader of that age would encounter, which is the entire point of the game.
In the other half, the risk-style turn-based system that governs the movement and generation of troops and provincial improvements, the interface and system is simplistic enough to facilitate ease of use, and yet there is just enough lurking underneath the tech tree to give you a chance to aim for domination in a way beyond mere tactical genius.
The debits against the game are the same that were covered in all the other reviews I've read of this game prior to purchasing it. The diplomacy system is a joke, and basically useless, the religion aspect is frustrating as a Catholic, non-existent as an Orthodox, and kind of cool as a Muslim. The lack of naval control is infuriating, especially when playing as a nation dependent on an island. The battles, for all their innovation in terms of realism, are simply too small; battles of thousands of troops (I once had 8000 Englishmen against 6000 Germans in the decisive battle of my war against them) wind up being mere battles of the first sixteen platoons battling against one another, then holding the border of the battle map and scaring the reinforcements into submission (in the aforementioned battle, I lost 300 troops total to the Germans 3000 because I simply managed to take out their first wave rather quickly). Because of this, the system is only half-realized, as it was the massive battles that usually determined wars, not the skirmishes that are more-than-adequately presented in this title. The graphics, though simple sprites, worked well enough for the time and still convey the scope of battle fairly well. From what I've read, Medieval II improved in all these aspects, and as soon as this new job pays off, I may very well have a brand new video card by which to try it out.
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