Great idea - poor excecution

[ukie]

For me it was the most anticipated game of the year but as most of 1C games it came with a cartload of bugs and crashes and until the Devs fix the soft it will be gathering dust on the shelf.

Here is my take on it:

Graphics and presentation: 8/10

Pretty good at the battle screen - very nice details. But sad 1990's graphics at the world map - a little let down, but it is not too bad.

Music is pretty good. But the tracks are very limited so even though the music by itself lacks the annoying quality after a while the repetition will starts to irritate the player.

AI: 5/10

Lots of factors at the battle screen that define complex calculation of damage, morale, speed, e.t.c. Unfortunately it is completely pointless since the only time AI gets creative is during campaign predesigned battles.

Campaign and Game Mechanics: 6/10

The storyline is pretty lame but the fact that there is no time limit, and so one can roam the plains until he feels appropriate, somewhat makes up for it.

Economy is excellent lots of goods and price varies according to market demands. Very well done! Interface is also easy to follow with production/consumption tabs. However there is no control over building up of the economy of an individual settlement so economy often is very static.

A curious limitation is that you can play only for Teutons even though there are other Nations present. I guess it is a money squeeze move by Developers. That is of coarse if the game will catch on which I highly doubt considering it's poor tech support and numerous crash issues.

Replay value: 3/10

Pretty good... would be if the game didn't crash every 20-40 minutes. Unless you save every 5-10 minutes it will become extremely annoying. But even if you do the game will still crash or leave you with no quest or get stuck on one of the quests denying an action of NPC.

Overall: 5.5/10

This is an excellent mix of Mount and Blade with Knights of Honor and Total Warfare. The ideas behind the merge of those games are great but the execution leaves to be desired more... much more. Unless the Developer fixes all the crash issues and adjusts the AI it will turn into a big old flop.

[mitra]

I can agree with you on some points, but with other not. Anyway without entering in pointless discussion on point of views (de gustibus non disputandum), you can see recently bigger software house did worsly, sometime with a suspect of malice (can we speak of Ubisoft and "from dust" affair?), and it is not the only title which go out with bugs (other hide it with access to open beta via pre-payment); the fact is that the PC configurations in the last times are some manies which is impossible be sure the softwares work on all, especially if you want your software be optimized for run also on PC with low characteristics, without taking 20 giga of space on your harddisk without reason. The same NTW vanilla continue to crash still now in multiplayer, and ETW (payed the double of RW2) go out bugged, poor AI, and unbalanced; we waited a good patch for months (it remains unbalanced).

I know how hard are working the programmers of this game (without the resources of CA), for resolving the problems and giving more features at every patch; i know also the potential of expansion and moddability of game so I'm more optimistic for the future of this series.

[He111]

I haven't had any crashes as yet.

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[Piemaster]

Dissenters gonna dissent.