In other words, it’s a ridiculously brilliant game.Īs before, the main single-player campaign game is split in two, with a turn-based map in which you build units, develop your cities and grow your power base, and real-time battles when it’s time for your armies to hit the field. Predictably, Medieval 2 is just what you might expect: a glossy update of the original Medieval: Total War, taking into account the changes and refinements added in Rome: Total War, but with new enhancements thrown on top.
So some spiteful, cynical part of me wants to tell you that this is where it all goes wrong – this is where Total War jumps the shark. Even Age of Empires and Civilization can’t say that. The result is that rarest of things: a series that just keeps on getting better without a single damp-squib in the set. The Creative Assembly got the basics right with the very first game, Shogun, and have steadily refined it and expanded on it with each subsequent version, taking advantage of increased system speeds and new graphics hardware, but never radically reinventing the game or making an attempt to dumb it down in order to reach the widest possible audience. Part of the secret has been an evolutionary approach to the game design.
As far as most sensible people are concerned, the Total War series has become the gold standard for epic strategy games.
