Lords of the Realm II

The Good
This game has a great feel to it, especially in the early part when you're building your strength. Listening to the music, sowing my fields, moving my peasants, I'm totally immersed in an idealized medieval reality.

The scale is more intimate than in most strategy games. You see individual fields and know your exact population. The best part, which I wish was in a lot more games, is that there are seasons, so you see the map frost over in the winter and turn green in spring, and you look forward to the fall harvest.

The gameplay is a hybrid, turn-based for everything except the battles which are real-time. It works!

Maybe unintentionally, the game has an ecological message. You invade counties where the fields are packed with sick cows, and sell or eat them so they're less crowded, and your farms become more efficient. Then you can get even better efficiency by going vegan and getting rid of the cows entirely!

The Bad
As soon as you go to war, the music changes permanently to a tune that's not as good.

I can't get the game to work on any computer made after 1999.

I like my games easy, but once I figured out the resource management, this one got too easy even for me. I built my big stone castles and they never even got attacked!

The Bottom Line
Excellent fun medieval strategy game.

The Good
The interface was really easy - think back to high school economics explained as "guns and butter". You manipulate slider bars to decide what your kingdom will do (build farms, herd cattle, make weapons, mine iron or stone, etc.) There was also a more "in depth" view of what your people were doing, so you could allocate them based on a more numerical approach. In the real-time portion of the game, you "lasso" your men (like Windows icons), and click where you want them to go (or attack).

The background music was OK, and it changed when you were actually fighting. The characters made noises (a la WarCraft 2) that were unique and entertaining.

There was enough of a variation of weapons and armor to be fairly accurate. Pikemen were slow, crossbowmen were slower and shorter range than archers (but more deadly). Siege weapons made for a fun game, too.

There was also a travelling merchant you could sell and buy goods to.

The ability to add to your forces already seiging a castle.

Moats around castles were entertaining.

The Bad
Surprisingly a lot (most of it can be overlooked, though).

The slider-bar interface had a more "in depth" view to it, though I often found one or two people standing around doing nothing. Why they weren't automatically allocated, I'll never understand.

Graphically the game was a bit lacking. I think it was an early adopter of DirectX (3.0, if I recall), and it showed. Cut-scenes were grainy and ugly. The whole game requires you change your desktop to 256 colors (or you suffer from color interpolation). The real-time portions were jittery, too. The developers made huge battlefields, then made the characters run so fast it made you sick to try to follow them. Even the intro was a bit off in the timing department.

There really wasn't much of a story line (conquer the kingdom), but I'm not really sure how you could have made one fit this game.

Without the add-on pack, there were only 5 types of "castles".

I found it annoying that when I sold off all my cows, it didn't tell me I still had a farm or two devoted to cattle herding. It would have been nice to either change these automatically to grain, or at least tell me I had some left over.

The Bottom Line
It's biggest selling point is that it's a million times easier than turn-based and god-games like Civ2 or SimCity, and has some fun elements like WarCraft 2. It doesn't live up to any of those games in terms of sheer greatness, but if you're looking for something in the middle, this is it. There's really no micro-management, just basic management.

For all it's faults, it's a really fun game. I picked it up for $25 when it was fairly new, and now I see it for $10 or so (if at all). It's definitely worth it.

There is some replay value, but keep in mind that different scenarios are just that - there aren't any new toys to play with. Basically as the game progresses they throw more at you to see if you can handle it.

The Good
A very good game in terms of combat. Instead of real time fighting, and army has to engage another army in combat. Another good thing was how the castles were attacked, you had several terms to prepeare (the game went in terms, summer, fall, winter etc.) for the attack, and also build siege engines. How the army was made was also very realistic, it had to be drawn for the civilian population. The economy was also quite realistic. The graphics were quite good and the gameplay was excellent in my opinion. Random diseases, at random times also made the game more interesting.

The Bad
One thing that was overlooked in this game was that in combat, that the smaller the army, the smaller the units on the battlefield (2 people, 4 people etc. per unit). Sometimes the units were so small that a few archers could kill them all before they reached the enemy.

The Bottom Line
This is an excellent game with a well balanced military and a fairly good economic simulator. The point of the game is of course, war. But in order to win you also have to manage your resources and grow wheat and cattle. You must produce weapons for you army and generate enough food for both you civilian population and your military. Overall, a very good game with excellent graphics for when it was released.