One of the biggest names in Real Time Strategy games is the Total War franchise. You'd be hard pressed to find a strategy buff that hasn't enjoyed at least one game in the series. I remember when I first picked up Medieval Total War, and led the English to conquer all of Europe. Great times, great times indeed.

I recently, as in a few minutes ago, got to watch a brief preview of Medieval 2: Total War. The game uses the same engine as its predecessor, Rome: Total War, however, there's a lot more subtle graphical nuances in the new game. As I did not get a chance to play the game myself, and it looks like it plays similarly to the rest of the games in the franchise, I will mostly be talking about the graphical enhancements made to the game.

For starters, the game features dynamic weather this time around. Rain can get heavier over the course of a battle, fog banks can roll in to block your view of the field, and generally, the game's environment should feel much more realistic, as opposed to each battle having just one constant weather effect.

Medieval 2: Total War also has new enhancements like water that has reflections, more detailed buildings and indeed, now every building is destructible. What sets this destruction apart from the previous incarnations of the series, is that now the buildings fall apart in a much more realistic fashion. I watched as artillery battered a castle wall, with pieces falling off, and colliding with other broken pieces of the wall as they fell. It looked great, and really added to the suspension of disbelief. While this game isn't finished, this effect still looked awesome.

The units are also far more varied. Instead of having thousands of clone soldiers, each wearing the same armor, colors and looking almost exactly the same, the new units have slight subtleties that set them apart from one another. Units might have slightly different colors, and their armor might look a little different from the guy standing next to them. I noticed a nice variety of helmets on all the different knights too. This is a nice touch, as one of the graphical detractions of previous Total War games has been having units that don't look like individual soldiers, but rather, a bunch of cookie cutter, carbon copies of one another.

The new game also posts twenty-one new factions, and contains over two hundred and fifty different unit types. While I don't know if the difference in all of the different units is simply a matter of some units being veteran units and some being rookie units, the battle I saw had considerable variety in the units that were fighting. Of course, I was only looking at the English and the Turks, only two factions, and perhaps not the most extreme examples of armies that have completely different and unique units (although I'm sure there are plenty of differences between all of the factions).

While Medieval 2: Total War might not be a leap in a new direction for the Total War franchise, it certainly will be a remarkable improvement on the last Medieval: Total War, if not in gameplay, than at least in graphics.

-- Jackson 'Smapdey' Johns

Those nifty yellow outfits won't do you much good!

Talk about getting up close and personal...

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