'Epic' doesn't quite begin to describe the scope and scale of the latest Total War game--there's a lot of strategic depth, with plenty of amazing combat to enjoy.

1. Game Like Medieval Total War 2
2. Game Of Thrones Medieval Total War 2
3. Medieval 2 Total War Game Of Thrones

By Jason Ocampo on

In our version of the Hundred Years' War, England was well on its way to spanking France in record time when those dastardly Danes betrayed our alliance and ruined the fun. About 150 turns later, we found ourselves bogged down in a three-front war against France, Denmark, and a late-to-the-party Spain, though at least those tenacious Scots were finally put down after a lengthy, hard-fought campaign in the north. Still, armies and navies were committed to battle as quickly as they were raised; spies, assassins, priests, diplomats, and merchants scrambled around the map and did their thing; sieges were laid and cities sacked; and battle followed bloody battle. And this is the 'short' campaign in Medieval 2: Total War. In a nutshell, that summarizes what is both awesome and somewhat daunting about the latest game in the popular Total War strategy series. With its huge scale, deep gameplay, and beautiful graphics, this is perhaps the most seductive game about the Middle Ages yet, but it's admittedly quite a handful to take in.

Mar 01, 2014 With this machinima I wanted to pay tribute to two beautiful factions in medeival 2 total war, France and England. It is also probably my last machinima. Medieval II: Total War - Take command of your army and expand your reign in Medieval II - the fourth installment of the award-winning Total War series of strategy games. Direct massive battles featuring up to 10000 bloodthirsty troops on epic 3D battlefields, while presiding over some of the greatest Medieval nations of the.

Like in most strategy games, your goal in Medieval 2 is to try to conquer the known world. And as a ruler of a medieval kingdom, this means you have to rely on knights, men-at-arms, archers, catapults, cannons, and everything else you'd expect out of a movie such as Braveheart or Kingdom of Heaven. That's not all, though; you also have a small array of agents to call upon. Diplomats can negotiate cease-fires (useful when you need some time to rebuild your strength) or alliances; princesses can shore up the loyalty of a general or a neighboring faction through marriage; spies can give you a peek at a fortified city's defenses; assassins can take out enemy agents. Then there are priests, but we'll get to that a bit later.

Since it's a Total War game, Medieval 2 sports two layers. The 'big picture' is covered in the turn-based strategic layer, where you can examine a map of Europe and manage your empire. From here, you have command of all your settlements, armies, navies, and agents. You can also construct improvements to enhance the economy or allow you to build the latest in 15th-century military technology. For example, building paved roadways not only increases trade in a province, but it also helps speed along troop movement; improving farmland, furthermore, can help generate more food, and thus more gold.

Medieval 2 introduces a few new twists to the established formula of the original game. Settlements come in two flavors now, towns and castles. Basically, towns and cities generate a lot more cash, but castles generate a wider variety of military units and are much harder to capture. It's an interesting idea, and it's not exactly a detriment to the experience that the supercities of the original game are no more, but this does add in a bit more micromanagement as you have to constantly shuttle troops and agents between various settlements. For instance, you might want to send depleted formations back to a castle where they can retrain and upgrade with the latest weapons and equipment.

All of this costs cash, of course, and it's safe to say that you'll be scrimping for every spare gold piece possible, especially early on in the game. The economic game has been bulked up a bit with the addition of merchants and resources. Basically, there are resources such as wheat and wine that are located on the map, and by enlisting a merchant and placing one on a resource, you can tap that resource for gold. However, one merchant can try and 'buy out' another merchant sitting on a resource, so you'll be managing merchants while you're also busy maneuvering all the other pieces in the game.

Basically every aspect of medieval life is covered, not the least of which is religion. You must construct churches or mosques to support the faith, and if you're a Catholic nation you can even get involved in some popery by getting your man elected pope. This isn't just for fun, either; having the pope on your side can be a very powerful thing, because he'll be much more willing to overlook some of your aggressive transgressions against your Christian neighbors. On the other hand, if you hack off the pope or one of your sworn enemies gets their man elected, the best you can hope for is to get excommunicated, and the worst is that you find yourself the target of a crusade, which means that it's open season on you. The papal election basically works like this: You enlist priests to help maintain the faith in your provinces as well as take care of any heretics or witches that crop up. The more effective a priest, the more likely he'll be promoted by the church to become a bishop and then a cardinal. Every time a pope dies, the three most senior cardinals are put up for election--and here's where you can engage in diplomacy to buy votes for your man. However, if you fail and you vote for the losing side, the incoming pope will have a grudge against you.

All of this skullduggery and maneuvering is going on while you're busy with your main task, raising armies and issuing them movement orders. The sheer variety of units that you can call upon is impressive, and each faction has its own distinct units, such as the English longbowmen or the Holy Roman Empire's gothic knights. As you'd expect, it's combined arms that wins the battles, so you can create armies consisting of spearmen, men-at-arms, mounted knights, bowmen, siege weapons, and much more. And after a battle, you'll be sending these units back to a castle or a town to replace losses, so there's a lot of army management throughout the game. Put this all together and it sounds like a lot of management overall, and it is, though aside from a few interface tweaks that we'd like to see, this is an engrossing experience. There's so much depth in the strategic game that you could automatically generate the results of battles and you'll still spend hours trying to outmaneuver your opponents diplomatically, militarily, and religiously.

The game restricts you to only about five major players at first (England, France, the Holy Roman Empire, and so on), but after you win a campaign game you can unlock 12 other factions covering Europe, North Africa, and the Near East. You can even send armies to the New World and battle the Aztecs, though you'll likely find yourself with more than you can handle back in the Old World. You can play as any faction, and there are two victory conditions that you can pursue. The 'short' campaign usually has you trying to conquer about 15 provinces on the map, while the long campaign is up to three times longer. If you're in store for a quick strategy game you'd best look elsewhere, because even the short campaign can easily occupy a week or so of casual play.

Campaigns will last even longer if you choose to fight out each battle in real time, and while you can usually skip over the minor skirmishes by letting the computer instantly generate the results, you'll most likely want to dive into the larger scrums--not only because you don't want to risk losing a major battle with roughly even odds due to a flip of the computer's coin, but because there are plenty of jaw-dropping moments in Medieval 2's combat. The 'clone' armies of Rome: Total War are no more, and the brightly colored formations look incredibly detailed and varied. Best of all is that the combat animations are much more fleshed out. In a huge battle with thousands of warriors slamming into one another, you can easily pick up the individual duels going on as your men fight for their lives. You'll see guys getting knocked to the ground and struggling to get back up on their feet when their opponent delivers a finishing blow, as well as other cinematic moments. There are some weird anomalies, like when formations of men get jammed around a ladder, but the awesome spectacle of it all is glorious.

Control over all these units is a bit nightmarish, but battles tend to have that effect on command and control, as all plans fall apart once contact with the enemy is made. You're rewarded for using tactics correctly, like not sending knights into the teeth of pikes and maneuvering them to hit the enemy from the flank or the rear. Or you keep your archers safely protected to the rear, where they can inflict the most damage on your enemy. All the decisions that you made during the strategic campaign finally pay off in battle, like the composition of your armies, the upgrades that you've equipped them with, and the generals that you chose to lead them in battle.

You'll need a fairly powerful system, though, in order to appreciate the large-scale battles in all their grandeur without any frame rate hits. This is a demanding game, especially when there are thousands of warriors fighting onscreen at once. Our midrange system struggled to keep up, but on a high-end system the visuals were good enough that we could just sit back and soak it all in. And the campaign map looks beautiful, aided by the sense that you're not so much looking at a map but rather at a 3D representation of a living, breathing world. Tiny ships ply the trade routes between cities, caravans haul goods on the road network, and much more. The visuals are also aided by the addition of cool cinematic movies that show the results of various actions, like assassination attempts gone comically awry, royal weddings, and papal elections. Medieval 2 also has excellent audio. The music ranges from pleasing and subtle throughout the campaign map to bombastic and pompous during battle, though the musical cue that we liked the most was the haunting defeat chorus after losing a battle. There's plenty of voice work, too, as most emissaries will talk to you in appropriately accented English depending on their nationality. The prebattle speeches given by your generals are both rousing (in a Shakespearean way) and tactically sound, and you can glean important hints about the upcoming fight.

Aside from the single-player campaign, there are a few extra modes in Medieval 2. A single-player skirmish mode lets you create custom battles, so you can pit the Mongols against the Aztecs, for instance, while there are seven historical battles that revisit great moments in world history, such as Agincourt, where Henry V overcame all odds and crushed the French. The multiplayer portion of the game is restricted to battles. Indeed, given the scope and scale of the single-player campaign, we imagine that resolving a multiplayer game would be all but impossible save for the most dedicated of players. Yet one day we'd like to see some kind of small-scale multiplayer campaign that lets you use all those strategic assets against other players. Multiplayer itself features only two modes, last man standing and scored resolution, but the basic idea remains the same in that you want to kill as many of the other guys as possible. Battles support up to eight players, so you can really get a big scrum going on, but the meat of the game is certainly in the single-player campaign.

Medieval 2 isn't a hard game in the technical sense, as the controls are fairly intuitive for the most part. However, it is a game that requires you to pay a lot of attention, especially to what the enemy is doing. The artificial intelligence will certainly keep you occupied on the medium difficulty setting. The AI is smart enough to probe for weaknesses in your defenses and then attack if you're not careful, so you need to keep your guard up at all times. Unfortunately, enemy turns take a tediously long time to resolve on the default settings, as you have to sit and wait for every unit in sight to make its move. You can turn enemy movements off and the turns will go by much quicker, though you do lose the chance to see what the enemy is doing during its turns.

Still, Medieval 2 is an excellent strategy game--there's just so much here to occupy you for hours. At the same time, you'll need to be committed to get through the campaign, as it can take up a lot of time. If you're a strategy fan looking for an epic experience, though, you'll be hard-pressed to pass up Medieval 2's rich historical texture, popular setting, beautiful visuals, and deep gameplay.

Judging the best Total War games is tricky. Maybe it’s because the concept of ‘best’ depends on what kind of mood you’re in—I play them on rotation, influenced by whichever books, films, or other games I’m consuming at the time. Watching the Battle of the Hornburg makes me crave Total War: Warhammer; reading about the crusades make me yearn for Medieval 2. These are ‘feel’ games, which satisfy cravings beyond the need for sharp strategy or pitched battles. They let you twist history, create new stories, or roleplay as your favourite generals.

There’s also precious little to separate them, especially at the top end of the order. The factors that make the series a success are found in every game, and it’s often only the strength of the setting that sets the games apart. There are obvious outliers—Empire and Napoleon feel like they’re from a different universe—but they all offer the same mix of conflict and conquest, failure and domination.

In order of preference, here are the best standalone Total War games.

10. Rome 2

It says loads about Total War that the lowest entry on this list isn’t a poor game—it’s just not as good as people hoped. The still-excellent original set a high bar, but that wasn’t the only issue: Rome 2 had a flawed launch and played like an uneasy transition to a more advanced system. Because of that, it’s a harder game to love.

Truthfully, the game’s reputation is a little unfair—the numerous bugs and wobbly AI have been patched, and when it works, it’s as deep and rewarding as any other Total War. I also has an amazing selection of unique factions, making this feel like one of the richest entries in the series, if not the most revered.

Read our Total War: Rome 2 review.

9. Medieval

Game Like Medieval Total War 2

There’s still loads to love about Medieval, but much of it has been refined and improved in the sequels. It bravely expands the scope of the, adding elements such as loyalty, religion and espionage, and because of this it feels like a deft representation of the brutal, tumultuous setting. It’s also the game that really nailed the ‘feel’ of Total War’s battle system—gleaming armour, lines of armoured troops smashing into each other, rousing music and improved graphics.

It obviously looks simplistic when compared to the recent games, but the impact at the time can’t be underestimated. Shogun started it all and Rome refined it, but Medieval expanded the series in a way that belies the simple presentation.

8. Shogun

Game Of Thrones Medieval Total War 2

Like the first Medieval game, Shogun isn’t low on this list because it’s poor, but because it feels like a thing from a different era. It also suffers from a sequel that stands out as one of the most dramatic and compelling entries in the series. But despite this, the original Total War game has moments that linger in the mind years after you first played it—things like charging into ranks of spearmen with a Kensai sword saint, or the desperate crackle of doomed musketeers resisting a cavalry charge.

If you want to play a Total War game set in feudal Japan you’re far more likely to play the sequel, but this is worth playing for posterity—a beautiful, stirring snapshot of the series that followed.

7. Empire

There was so much that could have gone wrong with Empire—the shift away from melee units, the flimsiness of ranked rifle fire, the specificity of naval conflict—but it did an admirable job of integrating systems that were alien to a game previously about hammering conflict and cavalry charges. It took until Napoleon for those creases to be ironed out. The AI is weak and the scale and scope can be troubling for anyone stepping up from Medieval 2, but it’s still an incredible achievement. It embraces concepts that would be impossible in earlier games, and the technology trees have a much more direct effect on the game (plus there’s something hopeful about the abolition of slavery being the ultimate expression of enlightenment).

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The battles lack the muscular impact of melee focussed Total War games, but the sound of cannon roaring on a crowded battlefield is still exhilarating. And one final, very minor thing: the theme tune from the main menu is incredible.

6. Napoleon

Napoleon takes everything Empire did well and refines it, streamlining and improving the best bits of its sprawling, often flabby predecessor. But it’s more than just a mere improvement: Napoleon represents Creative Assembly learning how to properly apply a story to an emergent game. The game is a testament to Bonaparte's brilliance, and the conquests are essential because they’re conducted with humanity and impartiality.

As well as being a superb Total War game, it’s a fascinating way of delving into a turning point in Europe. You get to experience the triumphs and failures of an incredible military mind, and it’s an unusual, often moving way of seeing something that still echoes through history. Experiencing huge conflict through the eyes of a few people makes this a humbling, brilliant, utterly essential experience.

5. Attila

Medieval 2 Total War Game Of Thrones

The most characterful moments from classic Total War games usually happen organically—the brave mercenary army on the edge of your empire, the feckless offspring of crusading generals. Attila is the first successful attempt to weave these stories into the game itself. It almost makes Total War a misnomer. It’s not just about fighting: Attila is game of politics, feasting, famine, desolation, and migration, set during one of the most fragile and fascinating periods of history—Europe still feels like a unformed concept, ready to be shaped or smashed as you see fit.

It also does a great job of folding in more complicated elements, such as weather and guerilla warfare—perfect for anyone more used to the simple clarity of earlier Total Wars. And like Warhammer, everything you do is under the shadow of a gathering storm: it’s not if Attila and his Hunnic army will arrive, but when. A brutal, unforgiving and wonderfully complex strategy Total War game.

Read out Total War: Attila review.

4. Rome

Rome was the first game where the scale of the conflict completely overwhelmed me. I’d pause every elephant charge to enjoy the impact; chase down every last fleeing slinger just to see them stampeded. It was also the first taste of what remains my favourite element of the series: the specific conflicts that appear in every game, when you and a rival faction push at each other’s borders until the dam breaks and you flood into their land. It helps that the setting is familiar to anyone who’s studied history (or read Asterix).

It’s immediately and deeply satisfying, and the only thing better than driving the Roman war machine across the Europe and beyond is defying history and withstanding it. Chuck in the savagely unforgiving Barbarian Invasion—the only Total War game that forced me to become a Roman vassal—and you have the best example of this time period in the series.

2. Total War: Warhammer

The greatest Total War moments come from seesawing conflict, where old powers fall and new ones replace them. The prevalence of these moments in Warhammer is what justifies the high spot. It’s a grasping battle for survival that distills the best bits of the series, and it’s made more vivid by a rich, relatable low-fantasy setting. The battles feel huge, but it’s the looming threat of Chaos that make every game into a desperate story—when they finally arrive arrive, races scramble into fragile alliances and every failed invasion feels like a gasp for air. It’s also the most varied Total War: every race is eased into Total War’s systems with meticulous care, and they’re different enough to make this feel like a massively generous game (if you’re willing to forgive Chaos pre-order nonsense, that is).

It’s not perfect—the campaign pacing is off, meaning that grand victories can feel like a wafting afterthought accompanied by a sprawl of unreadable stats—but it’s gaming’s finest representation of a Warhammer world that no longer exists.

Read our review of Total War: Warhammer and check out our favourite Total War: Warhammer mods.

3. Medieval 2

Medieval 2 owes an unquestionable debt to the games that came before it, but it has something magical that sets it apart from its predecessors. It’s an exemplary setting for a Total War game—a time of conquest, crusades, and corruption, with enough stability to make each faction relatable and emboldening opportunities for expansion and invasion. Your place in the world makes every game unique. Play as England and the temptation to reach out and crush your neighbours is irresistible; play as Egypt and you’ll realise how shitty it is when barbaric Christians call crusades against you for no reason.

In Kingdoms, it also has a fantastic expansion that focusses on historical flashpoints and adds nuance and detail to the sweeping conquests of the main game. The AI can be soft at times, but it’s still a vicious challenge when the Mongols turn up. And if it’s still too easy for you, an amazing selection of mods breathe extra life into an already comprehensive game: Stainless Steel and Broken Crescent are both still essential today.

2. Total War: Warhammer 2

The sequel manages to surpass Total War: Warhammer with its smart vortex campaign and inventive factions. The high elf forces are the most conventional, but even they get dragons and magic. The lizardmen have the most colourful forces of the series so far, and the skaven are a brilliantly sneaky faction who bring up reinforcements from underground. The map design tends towards more interesting campaigns than the large continent of Total War: Warhammer 1. Dinosaurs vs. rats vs. elves vs bad elves, what's not to love? Bespoke add-on campaigns like the excellent Curse of the Vampire Coast have only made the game feel deeper and more creative than it did at launch.

Read our Total War: Warhammer 2 review and check out the best Total War: Warhammer 2 mods.

1. Shogun 2

There are other games on this list with more units, greater scope, and grander settings, but Shogun 2 is Creative Assembly at its cohesive best. Globetrotting conquest is replaced by a frenzied struggle to unify Japan, but it never feels small. Instead, the narrow focus makes Shogun 2 a rich, wholly immersive experience, with a superb campaign in one of the most evocative periods in the series. It also fixes many traditional Total War problems. The AI has learned how to use boats and expands aggressively on higher difficulty levels. Clans feel distinct.

And, best of all, The Shogun can declare you an enemy if you get to powerful, preventing you from sweeping to victory—instead of rolling over factions one-by-one, you have to protect the resources you’ve spent time compiling. It’s also magnificently designed, meaning that new players can easily adopt its systems while Total War vets can sit back and let this beautiful, brilliantly-plotted game deliver all the moments that make us love the series.

Check out our Total War: Shogun 2 review.