Good ideas but poorly executed
User Rating: 6.3 | The Guild 2 PC
The Guild II is very similar to Europa 1400, many new features have been added but at its core its still the same game, great for people who love all the sim games. Some of the biggest differences between The Guild 2 and Europa 1400 are that the developers tried to modernize the game by letting your character run around the game world instead of micromanageing your businesses from overhead with no visible character in the game, this opens up many more possibilitys and was a good step they even changed the courting of spouses so now you its more like the sims where you pick an action from an action panel at the bottom like "kiss, hug, complement, give gift" overall good improvements. The new cameras arent all good however as they take some time getting used to at first and the new cameras make it harder to look around inside your buildings or while your inside other town buildings. The new government changes arent too great either, in Europa 1400 there were many offices available and up to 6-8 people could apply for each office but now in the Guild 2 there are fewer offices and you have to start from the bottom offices if 4 people apply before you get there you have to wait until the office is open agian, there is also a fee to apply for offices now so if you lose the election you will lose your hard earned money as well. Manageing your business has changed alot too, you can no longer hire managers to run your extra businesses for you and its really difficult to make money early on in the game (at least alot harder then in Europa 1400). Time also moves by alot quicker then in Europa 1400, every time you end a turn the next turn you will wake up 4 years and a season later which makes for really short character lifespans. You can now also control up to 3 characters at once by grouping them together (highly suggested because if you ungroup them the AI will just walk all over town, goto church and keep getting pickpocketed or robbed instead of improveing its skills, helping with your business or applying for local offices). The old Action points system has now been done away with, instead your character can "train" at his/her house with a cooldown on the skill, they also moved all the abilitys of the buildings to a bottom action panel. The game had a rough launch with many many bugs and memory leaks (the german and uk releases) but the devs said that the U.S release will be shipped out pre-patched so it shouldnt have the same bugs the uk and german releases were shipped with. If you were unfortunate enough to buy the uk or german release however most of the issues except poor game performance, portrait/grathics glitches, and a dumb ai are fixed by applying the german 1.15 patch then changeing the language back to english after applying the german patch by editing the .ini files in your installation path (change language from german to english).
Its a fun game but I find it really hard to play rouge classes without any tutorial on them and the game crashing on me when i start to do really well doesnt help matters either.
