A huge immersive, game that everyone should try out!
From the start of the truly epic grand campaign you must select between 5 different factions including England, France, Holy Roman Empire and Venice among others. Then you must begin to conquer the world either through military might or coercive diplomacy.
Their are 21 factions in total all with their own unique units, strengths and weaknesses. To unlock new factions you either need to destroy all that they have and remove them from the earth, or force them to bow to your might by demanding them to become vassals under you.
To declare war on another factions means that you'll have to build an army and defeat theirs, then move to capture their cities and castles. The unrestricted battle maps are brilliant to play as you really feel like a true commander, through organising your formations and following through with your strategies. Now to capture a castle or city you need to besiege the settlement and build war machines such as a battering ram to be able to break through their walls and defences. At first the sieges are fun and a nice change of pace but you'll find yourself repeating that process over and over again. you'll soon wish for a little more tactical freedom than just cramming as many soldiers on the walls or behind the gates as possible.
Creative Assembly has done a good job with this game due to the fact that every faction is noticeably different from each other. No two factions are the same. Religion also plays a key role in this game. As a Christian you must try and follow the popes will and crusade against the Muslims in the east. Or repel the infidel Christians from reaching the holy lands.
The audio in this game is top notch. With fierce battle musics to peaceful city building tunes. It also has brilliant voice acting with each faction actually with it's own accent; the French will speak French, the Scottish sound Scottish and so on.
Medieval 2 total war is definitely worth getting because of the tremendous amount of replay value, I don't imagine anyone can rightly say they've completed every factions campaign or even captured every settlement in the map is still a very hard challenge.
This game is an example to all real time strategy games of what should be achieved. Anyone with a decent enough computer must buy this game and experience the medieval era yourself.
The good:
Close historical accuracy. Massive game with endless replay value. Impressive graphics and detail. The larger battles are great fun to organise and command over 1000 soldiers. Great sound effects.
The bad:
Sieges can feel restricted. Towards the end of the game you become near unstoppable as the enemy just can't compete with you, which makes it too easy.
Gameplay - 9
Audio - 9
Graphics - 9
Presentation - 10
Overall - 9.5