(This review reflects the state of the game in late 2011 I'm just resubmitting it because my original review's text got corrupted somehow)(This review reflects the state of the game in late 2011 I'm just resubmitting it because my original review's text got corrupted somehow)
Good idea crippled by poor execution.
The problem with this game is that there are too many core features that either don't work as intended, don’t work at all or use numbers that are imbalanced to the point where they make other features useless. The only thing mildly enjoyable is the actual combat, but even that feels inferior to games with similar combat engines like King Arthur or some of the better Total War iterations.
However, the rest of the game, which is supposed to give you the context and motivation to keep playing battles is so broken, it swiftly comes crashing down on itself, leaving you with zero desire to keep playing once you're bored with the TW style battles. Here's why:
- Most of the game revolves around upgrading your units through battle experience. Problem is, it's not worth doing so. Why? Because their losses become disproportionately more expensive to replace after each upgrade beyond level 2. E.g. If you upgrade your level 2 swordsmen to level 3, they become twice as strong, but 10(!) times as expensive to replace! This goes for all stat upgrades too, which is especially ridiculous if you only upgraded the squad size, as that simply means there will be more units in that squad, no better equipment, no better training, just more units. Thanks to this, 1 lost knight in a 20-man squad costs 30 gold to replace, but if you upgrade the squad size to 40-man, that very same 1 knight (same gear, same training, same strength) now costs around 100 gold to replace! Such increased costs will bankrupt you even if you try auto-resolving battles against enemies dubbed "very weak" by the system, so you'll have to fight every battle yourself *and* keep your strongest units out of risky heavy engagements, which kind of defeats the point of upgrading them in the first place.
The bottom line is: high level units are a bad investment and that makes the entire unit upgrade system and any progression based on that (which is most of it) pointless.
- The other "core" RPG element of the game is the main character's skill development, which is as simple as it gets. It's just a list of skills you can spend 1 point on for each level you gain. However the skills are also pretty shallow, unoriginal and most of them hardly make a difference. Basically they're all +X% on some generic variable, like +2% increase to travel speed, +1% increase to critical strike chance, etc. There's also a constant lack of info, like what's a critical strike? There's no indication of such a thing anywhere else in the game, so what does it give? Instant kill? Double, triple, quadruple damage? Who does it affect? Ah well, with just 1% it wouldn't be worth it anyway. So moving on, what else is there. Skills without numbers. Maybe those are something original. Nope, they're just *missing* the numbers, like "Improves prices when trading" or "Improves combat abilities of swordsmen". These are obviously +X% skills too, the devs just thought it'd be cool not to share the exact numbers this time.
- When you order your army to attack another army, it often gets caught in an awful path-finding routine where it always tries to go where the enemy was a second ago instead of leading ahead, thereby sometimes ending up chasing enemies for minutes on end.
- Similar path-finding stupidities happen in the battles when your knights try chasing down an escaping archer troop for example. Your knights run over the flag-bearer guy, knocking him over while the rest continue to flee. This creates a gap between the flag-bearer and the rest of his troop, in which the knights get stuck, unable to decide whether to go for the flag guy or his buddies so they just ride around in circles in-between, happily running off the map along with them. If you try manually ordering them to ride over the flag-bearer, they just knock him off his feet, which doesn't seem to damage him as I once trampled a guy with 20 heavy knights about 9 times before he ran off the map, completely unharmed.
- Trading is supposed to be aided by a map which shows you where things are produced and where they’re consumed, without giving you any info on prices. Unfortunately, the producer town often sells its product for more than what the consumer town is willing to pay, which essentially makes the map a useless feature.
And I could go on, but these flawed, useless or self-conflicting features make up 80% of the game, with the other 20% being the TW style combat. Most of these issues can be fixed with patches or mods though, so lets hope the devs will see the light and patch up this mess someday. Right now, it feels too much like Mount & Blade at release, which was a game built around an awesome combat system, with everything else just tacked on half-baked. RW2 is the same, only without the "awesome combat system" part.… Expand
