Before there were missiles, grenade
launchers and tanks, armies fought with arrows, catapults and horses… lost of
them. And if you weren’t satisfied with the bloodshed in the original Medieval
II, Kingdoms offers a stellar addition that’s worth every dollar.
This stellar expansion doesn’t just offer one additional campaign, not even two,
but four huge campaigns that have enough new content that each could be packaged
by itself. They are split up into the Americas, Britannia, Crusades, and the
Teutonic Knights; each spanning large areas and even longer play times.
And the play times aren’t the only
thing that takes a long time to get through. The installation itself took what
seemed like an hour to get through, but that’s expected with a huge 4 gigabyte
expansion. I must mention though that one cool feature Creative Assembly added
is the ability to independently install each campaign separate to loosen up some
of your hard drive space if need be. You might be asking why so much space?
Well, I’ll tell you, friends: a couple hundred new additions including
buildings, units, and factions as well as the four huge campaigns.
Each campaign is set in a different
time period and offers various types of new unites and new abilities such as the
Teutonic Order, the Lithuanians, the Europeans, Native Americans, Scottish,
Irish, Egyptians, Turkish and even some others. This means that each time you
play you will be faced with new ways of thinking and therefore new strategies.
Even more so is the fact that you will have to adapt depending on whether you
are on the offense or defense, when to move and when to stay et cetera. My
favorite was probably city sieges where thousands and thousands of soldiers are
clashing, scaling walls and shooting arrows at one another. And with Medeival’s
engine, you can go so high as to what looks like ants fighting, or all the way
down to and individual battle of two people with the scroll of a mouse wheel. It
is completely seamless and has almost no performance impact. There were only a
few places in the game where HUGE amounts of people are all bunched up on screen
that my computer started to chug, but to be honest I expected it, and it’s not
unbearable by any means.
With all of the armies on screen in such numbers though, you might get slightly
discombobulated with what group is what, especially when they are all
intertwined with one another trying to fight. At least once in each battle I
would get confused as to where exactly some of my troops were, or what group I
was selecting. Also, there are some weird AI behaviors that are random. Some of
the troops will take off in a direction that isn’t really the way you clicked.
If you wait long enough they will eventually make it but their general must not
have taught them the fastest way to a point is a straight line.
Finally, the multiplayer is as fun
as always. You can bash your friends and spend hours online as the spectacle and
carnage takes place. The real difference when playing multiplayer are the little
idiosyncrasies in battle management that you might have gotten away with in
single player, will tear you apart here. You have to really strategize and
ultimately outsmart your opponent than win with brute force.
This expansion really does expand the core game and adds some great new units,
stories and campaigns (not to mention history lessons). If you enjoyed the
original, go out and pick up Kingdoms; it’s well worth 30 bucks.
|
Review Scoring Details for Total War II: Kingdoms |
Gameplay: 8.5
The same great gameplay as the original… times 4!
Graphics: 8.7
The sheer amount of units that can be seen on screen at once is staggering, but
the texture qualities suffers slightly as result when zoomed in.
Sound: 8.0
The music is pounding and robust, and the battles sound like beautiful chaos.
Difficulty: MediumHard
The Americas campaign as the tribes was really hard, but overall the game does a
good job of gradually expanding in both scale and difficulty.
Concept: 8.5
Thousands of battle hungry soldiers waiting for your command? Yes please.
Multiplayer: 7.5
Not the best multiplayer ever, nothing really stands out except the addition of
an automatic battle outcome calculator … but doesn’t that defeat the purpose of
actually playing?
Overall: 8.3
With so many additions, it really is hard to ignore, so if you enjoyed the
original, go out and pick up Kingdoms; it’s well worth 30 bucks.
