Medieval: Total War Review

Now, if we consider the above reasons, it's obvious to see why Medieval goes beyond Shogun in terms of the quality of real-time battles, but I have to caution you that even with these notable improvements there are still certain issues, which can make the combat rather confusing and even tedious at times. Get this: you still cannot position the units properly when you give out the move order! I mean, there was probably a good reason why the developers didn't include waypoints, but I cannot see for the life of me why they didn't work harder on this issue! It's demoralizing to see your archers facing the wrong way once they took up the desired position at a nearby hillside. Granted, this phenomenon doesn't happen as often as it did in Shogun, but it's still present. And that alone is annoying enough.

And while we're on the subject of archers, I must say that I've found my missile units to be surprisingly ineffective, even against lightly armed opponents. To give you an idea of what I'm talking about I'll describe a situation when you're trying to defend a province that has a river running through it. Usually, you position yourself near a bridge that goes across the river and you wait for the enemy to try and cross it. The idea is to have them march across the bridge, but not to let them cross it entirely. In other words, you trap them by cutting off the crossing with your strongest melee units, and then you pound on the enemy soldiers with your archers. But this tactic just doesn't work the way it should. This one time, hundreds upon hundreds of arrows were landing on the enemy troops, and even though they were lightly armed peasants, they only lost about 10-20 men. Now, I may not know much about medieval battles but I know that a rain of arrows must hurt like hell when you're dressed in a simple cotton tunic.

Furthermore, I had some real issues with the keyboard shortcuts, as you can group your units, but you can't use a shortcut to select them in the heat of the battle! I mean, there are ways to select specific type of units, like melee or missile units, but that's just not the same as being able to group your units the way you want and then issuing commands at a press of a button. For this, I had to click on the screen using my mouse, which really isn't the smartest thing to do when you're commanding a large number of units across a large battlefield - not to mention that my frame rate would drop during intense fighting scenes with lots of units, even though I played on a GeForce Ti 4400. But, that's another matter altogether.

The only other drawback to this game that I can think of might have to do with the fact that Medieval still doesn't have the feel of a bona fide sequel. It seems more like an excellently done expansion pack than a genuine sequel. Still, I have to say that this is an entirely subjective opinion, and readers should most definitely take it with a grain of salt. I may be a bit of a 3D elitist, but a game just doesn't feel like a true sequel unless I see major graphical innovations in it. Some would call that stupid, but then again - there might be some that would agree.

Overall though, Medieval: Total War is a masterfully done strategy management game, which furthers the excellent concepts that were introduced in Shogun: Total War. It is a well-conceived and intelligent game, which serves as evidence that a lot of careful deliberation has went into its development. The idea of total war is taken to another level, as Medieval: Total War clearly shows that total war is not all about brute force - quite the contrary. This is one of the chief reasons why this game is so addictive, and why it has such a high replay value. It's nice to see the original idea being carefully molded into a more advanced and elaborate one. For that alone, this game should be on the list of every aspiring King, Tsar or Sultan out there.