Quick review on my latest game acquisition.... Medieval 2. Picked up the dual pack that came prepackaged with the expansion pack: Kingdoms, and I'd say it's worth the investment.

If you've never played a Medieval Total War game in the series, I'd say start with this one if you have the rig. It really doesn't take a huge computer to run, but to get the full effect with the graphics pumped up to show hundreds of guys running around on the screen killing each other, I'd say have a decent rig. Otherwise, it will run, though not sure how well.

Basically, Medieval is a combination of turn-based campaigning, and real time strategy fighting. You plot your global domination around a 3d world map, and you can do so many things (your troops can only march so far on the board before they can't move any further) and you can build things such as sea ports, taverns, etc in your towns... And the you end your turn and the AI countries will in turn act accordingly, either peacefully or war-like depending on what they want or who they hate/like. If you engage in combat on the game board by purposely attacking a foreign city or army, you go to the RTS aspect of the game which can be massive. You can either try to capture enemy cities, or fight an army, where you coordinate your troops to fight the other country's army. If you don't want to fight, you can select to auto-fight and it will determine a winner based on what troops you have and how many, versus how many and what kind your opponent has. Generally, if you have more troops, you'll win, plus you'll lose less men if you have experienced generals on your units.

Medieval 2 is different than the one's I've played in the past where I can't seem to change which time period we start at. I remember in the old Medieval Total War game, you could start in the early medieval era, all the way up the Renaissance. This one you start in a set year and I don't believe you can change it. Also, it doesn't look like all the same regions are selectable as they were before. I was scrolling through and some odd ones weren't available. I really didn't dig in too deep, but it's worth a look on that aspect.

I started off in Venice, and slowly worked my way to conquering various territories, and slowly started realizing that my empire was not being run the way I really wanted it to, so I pretty much scrapped that (after about 10 hours of gameplay) and decided to take on the New World with one of the expansion campaigns. This is indeed quite a change of pace over playing the same European fights.... Now you're making peace and warring with the native americans, the Aztecs, Mayans, etc. You can play as the Spanish, or as one of the natives... I picked Spanish and started off by making peace with everyone till I could get settled in the couple of areas I started off with... I slowly started making up my army and fortune, until finally I could start taking out Rebels. Now, rebels are generally not associated with anyone, so you can fight them without starting a war with half the other cultures involved on the map. So once I had them, two of the AI countries started warring, so I sat back and waited for them to kill each other off, and then I wiped out the winner.

There are many strategic ways of going about this. If you are a super power with a big army, you can generally sway other cultures to do what you want with a simple "Do as we say or we'll attack" but that generally doesn't work.

With the America's expansion, one of the biggest things you had to keep up with was religion. Being in a new world, you have to make sure you convert the heathens using priests and it makes taking cities a bit easier, and revolts less common. Likewise, they'll shuffle out Sun God worshipers to counter your teachings...


I'm still playing, but so far I'd say graphics have come a long way, though there still a way's to go. Sounds are excellent and realistic. Music is ambient, and adds, though sometimes repetitive. Gameplay can be hard for people who aren't used to strategy games, but it's definitely worth a look even to download a demo of it to try out.

One of the problems might arise if you become bored if you're used to shooters like I am. So to take a break I installed S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl for kicks (also a good game once you patch it up and get some mods