Videogame Review: Medieval II: Total War

Studio: Creative Assembly
Released: September 22, 2004
Platforms: Windows
Availability: Buy on Amazon.com, Gog.com, Steam

Medieval 2: Total War is a real-time strategy and the successor to Rome: Total War. You control a faction during the Middle Ages and you use your wits and strategy to battle your way to world domination. You manage both the campaign map and the battle map, where you control your soldiers and direct them in combat.

What makes Medieval: Total War fun is that it’s not a city building game, but a real-time strategy game where you have to construct buildings, manage your cities, keep your citizens happy by constructing buildings that make them happy, manage your armies and conquer other cities to expand your empire.

Depending on if you choose a short or long campaign, you have to hold a certain amount of cities and certain cities on the world map by the time you reach a certain year.

The user interface has a lot of icons and buttons, but if you play through the tutorial it shouldn’t be that hard to order your troops on the battlefield.

There are a lot of keyboard shortcuts to help and that’s a good thing but I always just use the mouse to click on what I want my troops to do.

What’s also interesting about this game is watching your country become technologically advanced as your cities grow and you build new buildings to make your troops better.

You also have to manage your cities and keep the population happy while balancing your military expansion into other countries.

I found that diplomacy doesn’t really work and it’s just easier to start going to war and expanding than trying to gain allies outside of getting trade agreements.

This game is so much fun; I enjoy playing this game a lot. I’ve sunk hundreds of hours into this game. It’s a lot of fun. There are some improvements from Rome: Total War, but the gameplay is very much the same.

They have changed the interface and added more things to it, but it’s similar enough that if you’ve played Rome: Total War you should be able to find everything just fine.

It’s really exciting to see your soldiers charge into a city or on an open battlefield and slaughter your enemies. It’s also very nerve-wracking if you’re trying to hold off a siege on your city and there are more enemy soldiers than you have in your garrison.

The A.I. isn't always smart, but if you find it too easy you can start a new game and change the difficulty.

Battles are very intense and exciting to watch.

The graphics look really nice and it looks better than Rome: Total War. The effects are nice and the visuals are fun to watch.

Compared to the incredible graphics that games can use today, Medieval: Total War 2 can seem very old and dated, but there are a ton of mods including graphics mods to update it so it won’t look so dated.

This game has a ton of mods that make it even more fun to play. There are all sorts of mods that you can use for this game, but my favorite is the mod for The Lord of the Rings that converts everything in the game to look like Middle-Earth and you can play as various factions from the books. It’s called The Third Age.

There are also other mods for soldiers and A.I., so go to Mods Database and look up Medieval: Total War 2 to see if there’s a mod you might like if you want to mod your game.

The voice acting is also fun and I enjoy the pre-battle speeches. They are a highlight of the game. What makes them so enjoyable is that they are different based on what country you are playing, what country is your enemy and what traits your general has.

The speeches themselves range from inspiring to downright funny, it depends on character traits so it’s a lot of fun to hear the speeches before a big battle starts. Unfortunately in later iterations of the games they stopped making the speeches cinematic cutscenes and the writing for the speeches wasn’t as good in some of the newer games.

But when it comes to speeches in Total War games, these are my favorite. The voice actors are also very good.

The voice acting for the soldiers is also very good. They’ll yell and scream at each other when they fight so it makes battles more interesting too.

Jeff van Dyck, Richard Vaughan and James Vincent all did a great job composing the music. This game has an amazing soundtrack that I really enjoyed.

The music makes you feel like you are in the middle ages. The music fits the game and makes the experience even better.

Also, a fun addition is the spies and assassins videos that show you whether they succeeded or failed. The videos for assassination attempts can also be very funny if your assassin runs away.

It’s also interesting to see your spy level up as he improves his infiltration skills.

Medieval 2: Total War is rated T for Teen for language, blood and violence.

I love Medieval: Total War 2. It’s a great strategy game with good gameplay, exciting battles and excellent gameplay. It might not be graphically impressive now because of how far graphics have come, but it’s still a lot of fun to play.

It might not be 100% accurate according to the time period, but it is a lot of fun and it’s interesting to see how the game will play out.

It is a little complicated when you look at the user interface, but the tutorials will help you learn how to play the game.

I highly recommend Medieval 2: Total War because it’s a terrific strategy game. The visuals are very good, albeit a little dated. The voice acting is fun, the gameplay is excellent and you’ll be sinking a lot of time into this game trying to manage everything and take over the world as your faction.

I love it because it’s exciting and it’s always interesting to see if you can take over the world, the factions are varied and it’s fun to fight against the A.I. If you succeed with a good strategy, you feel really great about how you did.

If you lose, you have to try to regroup and hope you can recover before you’re attacked. It’s so much fun to play and it’s one of my favorite real-time strategy games.

It’s not a perfect game, but it is a lot of fun, but it’s old and not everyone likes old games. I prefer it over some of the newer Total War games because the newer games have made it even more complicated, but this one isn’t as complicated as the newer games.

I love it and I wish they would make a Medieval: Total War 3, but it’s probably not going to happen since they’ve been making games based on Warhammer 4,000 lately.

If you love games based on history you will love playing the Total War series.

It’s a great game and it’s not that expensive, especially if you get it on a Steam or GOG.com sale. It’s a must-buy game for any fan of real-time strategy games.