Highly Recommended.
User Rating: 8.8 | Medieval: Total War PC
RTS games come out all the time. Most of them only contain paltry populations, unreal gameplay, and primitive diplomocy. But, MTW is rather different from all the RTS's coming out today. It achieves a rare quality of historical and gameplay realism not seen in much games. And that is what makes this RTS so special and different from the rest. There are two "games" within this game to play. First is the battle engine, where you take the battles and use special units to duke it out, or a campaign, where you play diplomocy on Europe. Both games are pretty good, and pretty hard to master the first few weeks. You get to play a nation, and then conquer Europe, simply through diplomocy, epsionage, or just eat your way through Europe with the power of flesh and steal. In the battle engine, there are morale, ammo, weather conidtions that immede your troops, hiding in forests, flank attacks and ambushes - in other words, real time combat. The combat engine is not atrocious, but, there are some confusion about how to command troops, and sometimes when your troops split up and try to chase the enemy, it's hard to round them up, thus leading to potential disaster. Graphics in this game are not astounding, but, are not bad; as the 3D effects in the game can be subtle at times, and the units, although bitnaps, are fully animated and hardly look like bitnaps at all. Sound and music are very subtle as well, as sounds are used to indicate things that happen on the battlefield and the music oftens becomes more dramatic as the battle wears on. In conclusion, MTW is a game of many games, very realistic, and can take some time to master, but, highly recommended to anyone.
