GameScore:9
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Editors Plus Rating: +.2
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France and Spain are under English control, half of Europe is pressing against the Crown’s borders in the east as Egypt and the Arabic Moors push up through the Spanish crossing. The Pope is throwing out excommunications like there’s no tomorrow and pioneering explorers brave the New World in search of Aztec riches as all of Europe plunges into war. Total War.

 If you’ve never played a total war game before, you can expect two things, the first is to say goodbye to your social life for about half a year, and the second is to find yourself playing a turn based empire building game in the style of Civilization in medieval Europe – but when armies clash, the game drops to a glorious 3D battlefield where you’re in full tactical control of your whole force in real time. You’ll forge alliances, assassinate kings, compete in papal elections (if you’re a catholic faction), join in crusades or jihads, throw massive armies against castle walls and sack, pillage and loot to your heart’s content.

 The main single player experience is called the Grand Campaign, and it’s where you’ll do most of your playing – this is where you can fight huge battles as well as manage your empire on a long timeline. The campaign is split down into a long and short campaign, with different goals depending on the campaign and faction you choose. First time round, you only have access to five factions, but completing a campaign will open up all seventeen nations for play. Although there are many factions, the differences in unit type and gameplay style aren’t nearly as pronounced as in the more generic RTS games, so starting location and national personality are what you should base your choice on. To put it in perspective, the “short” campaign can take over fifteen hours to complete, and the long campaign? A lot longer.

 The campaigns give you a fixed number of turns to complete your goals, which will usually be capture x number of provinces and eliminate faction y or hold specific province z, but you can continue playing after completing (or running out of turns and failing) your specific campaign goals – if all you want to do is forge an empire from Aztec west to Turkish east with all of Europe under your command, at your own leisurely pace, you’re free to do so.

 The campaign map is split down into provinces and in each province is either a city or a castle. Castles are your major military production centres, while cities are more oriented towards economic and cultural growth. Each province type has specific advantages and disadvantages, castles have easy to control population happiness levels and are generally far harder for enemies to conquer, whilst in cities you can alter the taxation levels for more money, but your people may revolt and fall under rebel control. Losing a city to rebellion can be a major pain when you’re in the middle of a conflict with an enemy empire, so it pays to keep your people happy.

 You’ll most likely begin by producing a few units and attaching them to a general unit. Generals fulfil the ‘hero unit’ role you’re probably familiar with if you’re into RTS games. They are more powerful, and have many personality traits which translate to battlefield bonuses (a charismatic man may improve army morale, for example). Your generals also double up as city governors. Governors need to be placed within your cities or castles before you can micromanage the specifics of the province, and again their personality traits will impart bonuses (or penalties) on your province.

 Once you’ve got an army built, you can move the unit – symbolised by a single chess-piece style figure – across the campaign map until it reaches its target. You don’t simply ‘jump’ from province to province with your units. Instead, your units can move a certain distance each turn, and the map has specific detail, such as hills, rivers with bridges and forested area. If your army is standing on a bridge when combat begins, you’ll be fighting in real time 3D beside a river with a bridge crossing. Similarly, if you attack a unit atop a hill on the campaign map, you’ll find yourself having to fight uphill in the battle, which can put you at a significant disadvantage as downhill charges cause more damage, and archers have longer range when shooting from height. This means that choosing where to fight plays a significant role in your overall victory. It’s depth like this that really makes the game a thoughtful experience.

 When armies do eventually clash, the result is simply stunning. The beautiful 3D engine renders thousands of units in glorious detail and you can zoom far out for an almost birds-eye overview of the battle, or zoom right in close and watch duels between individual units. It’s difficult to put into words quite how amazingly good looking this game is – if you’ve got a capable machine, it’s just one of the most beautiful games out there when you consider there may be several thousand units onscreen at once, all performing fluid animations. A very cool addition is that the units are no longer clone armies, all the individual men within each unit will have varied clothes and armour appearances, usually a variety of perhaps three or four designs, which many not sound like much, but it makes your army feel far more realistic as each man looks slightly different to the men beside him.

 The game is pretty realistic in its use of combined arms and morale. Fans of Total War will recognise the familiar paper scissors stone vibe, as each unit is good against some unit types, but bad against others. You need to use most of the available units in cooperation, playing off the strengths of each unit. Morale plays a large role and attacking from the side or rear will reduce morale, and other things such as having your archers employ flaming arrows can further damage morale. Killing the enemy general unit will have a devastating impact on the enemy’s state of mind and, if you can manage morale correctly, you can cause an entire army to turn and run without many losses. But the same applies to your general, so you have to use him wisely and if the circumstance demands it, you may need to hide him at the rear of your army

 As well as fighting on open battlefields, when fighting for a province you will be either attacking or defending a castle or city. They look utterly amazing and it has such an epic feel as you have ranks and ranks of archers atop your ramparts as lines of enemy trebuchets lob boulders to bring the walls crashing down. It conjures fond memories of recent epic war films such as Troy, or Lord of the Rings. Winning (or losing) these city battles is a matter of holding (or losing to the enemy) the town square for more than a couple minutes, so once you’re past the walls, you stand a good chance of winning. Further equipment such as siege towers and ladders can be employed, as well as battering rams and gunpowder cannons once the technology is available.

 As well as military units, you have what the game refers to as agents. These agents range from diplomats capable of forming alliances with rival civilisations or instigating ceasefires to assassins who may remove enemy generals or agents where diplomacy fails. Religion plays a fairly large role in the game, and each province has a religious inclination which religious agents can influence. You’ll use religious agents such as priests or imams to convert provinces to your religious, which can help cause rebellions or ease your occupation of enemy territory of an opposing religion.

 Playing as a catholic faction means you answer to the pope. All catholic factions have a faction standing with the papacy, and as he wields considerable sway amongst all catholic nations, it’s wise to do as he asks. If he tells you to stop attacking a fellow catholic, you should – or he may excommunicate you – meaning you become fair game for all nations to attack, and if you really annoy him, he may even call a holy crusade on one of your provinces. Fairly regular papal elections let you vie to get your man named, which gives you far more religious leeway when you control the pope, and adds a further level of depth rather than there just being a pope and that is that.

 Keeping your economy running is equally important as your army, and trade plays a major role in keeping you in the black, but it’s all simplified in the extreme and is nothing more than building buildings at your cities which improve trade, such as ports or roads. You can see your trade lines on the campaign map as miniature horse-drawn carts travel along roads, or trade armadas travel from port to port. It’s quite beautiful to just sit and watch all the ships milling about in the ocean. There are also ships as military units, and controlling the seas can be key to victory. You don’t fight any ocean battles in real time, it’s all automatically resolved by the AI. But that’s not to say the ocean is an afterthought, you can use fleets to blockade enemy ports, which prevents trade and damages their cashflow, and you can use fleets to transport large armies quickly. There’s nothing quite as cool as sneaking an army behind the enemy front lines by boat, catching their heartland cities undefended.

 As well as looking beautiful, the game is extremely well optimised. It runs great with fantastically steady frame rates (on your standard high end pc) with very quick loading, and it even alt tabs very smoothly which is great. After a year of buggy, unfinished games and half baked console ports, playing a PC oriented game like Medieval 2 is just so refreshing. I experienced a total of two crashes in fifty hours of play

 The sound is also remarkable. The music is perfectly timed and just sounds like the music of war. Lots of heavy drums amongst the grunts, shouts and screams of the fighting and the dying units on the battlefield is great for the general atmosphere and you’ll feel like you’re listening to a battle between thousands of men. The campaign map music is subtler, using more floating string sounds, but works equally well. The music isn’t overdone at any time, it’s purely background and it adds a lot of feeling in a great way.

 If you’re fond of the turn based gameplay, but don’t like the idea of having to fight real time battles, you can let the AI resolve every fight for you, based on unit strength and numbers. So you can play the game purely as a turn based strategy game like Civilization, if you like. Similarly, if you aren’t too hot for turn based strategy, you can play custom battles where you select your armies and map, and then battle, or even play famous historical battles such as England’s victory over France at Agincourt – completely ignoring the campaign map.

 Multiplayer is sadly limited just to custom real time battles, and while this is great for fans of historic battles as Medieval 2 really is the best available, the lack of conventional RTS elements such as unit production and economy in the battles will probably put off all but the most hardcore of fans. Hopefully we’ll one day be able to play the campaign map online.

 Special global events, such as the discovery of gunpowder, the invasion of the Mongols and the newfound knowledge that the world is round, which opens up Aztec territories, serve to keep players on their toes as the world changes around them, and it also keeps the playing environment in a constant state of flux, so things never get too repetitive in what can be a campaign spanning well over forty hours.

 Total War has carved itself a name in history as one of the best empire building war game series ever made – probably the best – and Medieval 2 lives up to the Total War legacy in every way. The turn based elements are rich and engrossing, the real time combat is brutal and exciting, it looks amazing, sounds amazing, runs well on capable machines, has enough bells and whistles to satisfy even the most demanding Total War fan and has a lifespan which could easily reach triple digits. It’s not a game for casual players, and it’s definitely not something you can play in short stops and starts, it demands time – but for those able to give it the attention it craves, Medieval 2 is simply one of the best games of 2006.