Rating: 
Summary: Collecting Dust with Empire Earth
Review: M:TW sounded great in the beginning and I waited for the price to come down. I bought it a few months back and was bored with it after only a week. The AI was lousy and, as other reviewers have pointed out, cheats constantly. And silly things like the never ending "new improved Pope" that keeps sprouting up like a bad weed on your terazzo patio. Yes, it is in the context of "history" but the AI just keeps doing the same thing. Sort of annoying.
And I didn't get the battle scenes everyone was raving about - it was very disappointing. It reminded me of a game I used to play called "Art of War" when armies would sort of shuffle at each other and pluck each other down with arrows. For the uninitiated, that game was played with MS DOS. Point being, the graphics were pretty lame.
So, my M:TW copy is collecting dust right next to my other waste of money, Empire Earth. I am still playing Age of Empires II and it just never gets dull.
Rating: 
Summary: SHOGUN IS THE BEST!!!
Review: This game is simply the most realistic strategy game ever. It requires real strategy that includes makeing up for morale or using it to your advantage. The gameplay is awsome, fighting with samurai, ninjas, kensai and a whole lot of other stuff. The "risk style" strategy map is actually interesting and you may spend hours trying to get a ninja to a high honour to kill the enemy daimyo while battleing off his forces. One of the most awsome times in this game is when you are in a massive battle with many troops and multiple enemys! The sound and music are awsome and the music actually gets you in the mood of the game. The sounds of charging troops is also very awsome. The graphics are very good, especially the movie (NINJA ASSASINATION!!!) graphics. the many commands for your troops such as fast movements and good formation are also good. All in all this is one of the very best strategy games ever and ranks in the definate top ten, if not the top three (might even be #1).
Rating:
Summary: play for hours
Review: I have been playing this game for several months now. At first playing this game I had no clue what I was doing, though activision knew how to make a good walkthrough. This game is basically a medieval war strategy RPG. This game goes by the years. It kinda like playing chess to moving your troops around on the main board, but once your in battle... Thats the fun part. Once you enter a province that you are not allied with or own a short music will play then when your done your move you click end year then the other 11 CPU players go. after that it ask you if you really want to fight and you say yes and your off. Controling 10,000 troops at one time is hard but fun. Its more less like a real battle. Like some games your troops can get hit 10 times with bullets or arrows and not fall. In this game its like 2 arrows your dead. Its just a real time medieval war time strategy RPG. This game is alsome no doubt about that. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND THIS GAME!!!
Rating:
Summary: It's time to get Medieval on your *#@
Review: This game has stolen a large part of my life in recent months and is the most enjoyable simulation of Medieval warfare I've ever played. The world of Barbarossa, Saladin, Richard the Lionheart, Joan of Arc, the Mongol Horde, the Knights Templar and the Crusades, and the Inquisition are all richly recreated. The level of detail is broad enough to engross the player without being so sophisticated to actually drag down gameplay into a decision-making nightmare. And, the combination of real-time 3D combat on very lifelike terrain with turn-based campaign management on a Risk-style game board is probably the biggest selling point. Unlike in RTS games (e.g. Age of Empires) where the object of the game is simply a frantic resource gathering and building exercise, in Medieval: Total War, you get to take the time to worry about all the details of your economy seperately, so that you can then commit your attention fully to your role as general. I cannot tell you how fulfilling it is to build your empire across Europe, North Africa, and Mesopotamia fighting every battle and building every province. A game like Medieval: Total War is too broad to properly cover in a short review so I will focus mainly on the AI of the computer and a few key details of the game system in both the campaign and battle scenarios. Campaign:
The one thing about this game is that it is simply about war. The diplomacy system, and its lack of depth, clearly reflects this. You only have 3 diplomatic stances: war, neutral, and allied. For the most part, the term "ally" is a very loose term at best and you can never really know what your relationship with your friends are except by the amount of garrisons they keep camped outside your borders. In general, "ally" means that you are less likely to be invaded if that country neighbors your kingdom and that you can sometimes count on their support should your army invade a province that is accessible by their forces. But your relative command strength and the value of all your land holdings will determine how much security you'll have against rival factions. When you're at the bottom or the top, you'll be especially vulnerable to the machinations of greedy or jealous rivals. The aggressive monarch will ultimately persevere. The game is always full of surprises, though, and no two games will ever play alike but certain patterns do emerge that are dependent on which era you select as the game's start date and these patterns usually reflect historical truth. For example, in the Early period the Spanish of Castile are weak and exposed to the culture of Muslim N. Africa (Almohads) and often cave in under Islamic expansion leaving all of Western Europe ripe for conquest. However, under a good commander, the Spanish can persevere and reconquer Spain and then drive into the Holy Land by way of N. Africa to become the first successful crusaders, beating the French which have history on their side. Truly, anything can happen but it takes cunning and strategy and not a little bit of luck to survive. Overall, the campaign game is fairly simple and easy to learn although trying to keep track of your kingdom once it becomes impressively large gets to be a big headache as the game doesn't give out a lot of information display tools to help organize your realm. But the bottom line is money. The more of it you have, the more army you can support/create and the more likely you are to win. Lastly, all your generals have certain attributes that increase or decrease based on vices and virtues acquired in the game either randomly or by battlefield actions. Command and Acumen seem to have the most important effect in the normal game with Piety, Loyalty, and Dread being of less important or no importance. I don't know if they become more important in the higher difficulties. The Loyalty attribute of a province seems to be more important. If it dips below 100% you are almost certain to see the province revolt to either independent rebels or to the previous owners. This means keeping a garrison to cow the population into submission is just as important as defending your borders. Thus, it makes Blitzkrieg-style campaigns very unsuccessful. A final note: A REALLY neat thing about this game is that certain units only become availible when the game reaches a certain date. For example, until 1205, the arbitrary start date for the High period, no Catholic faction can train Chivalric Knights or Crossbowmen. Thus, even if you have all the buildings necessary to train these units, you still will have to wait until the year 1205 or 1321 to be able to take advantage of these advanced building structures. Unlike in Civilization or Rise of Nations, you can't "out-tech" your enemy because you build faster. Battle:
The only down side to the battle scenario is that tactics are fairly limited with castle assaults being the most limited. The developers took the attitude of using castle walls as merely fences to protect your soldiers from direct assault until the enemy artillery breaks open an opening. Your defenses are pretty much predetermined by the type of castle you have built on your province and will always provide the same level of defensive fire. You can't commit any of your troops (say, your archers) to the castle walls and the only artillery you can use as well against a castle are catapults or bombards. Siege towers and battering rams are apparently not supported in the Medieval world created by the developers. Save for the fact that in river battles your men can't cross anywhere except by storming the bridges, most of the fights that occur on open terrain are reasonably fluid. But it eventually becomes apparent that most battles are usually won or lost before they are ever fought, much to Sun Tzu's liking. Once you know the effects of terrain, weather, generals, and unit abilities, vulnerabilities, and counters, you can fight your battles with a clinical simplicity. Creativity generally doesn't work to your favor unless its about battlefield positioning. Overall a fantastic game although you might want to download the updates as they improve a lot of the minor gameplay flaws.
Rating:
Summary: This is worth every penny
Review: If you thought the original Shogun was as good as gaming got, welcome to the Warlord's version of medieval Japan. The expansions have truly done Shogun justice. If you were sick of starting out with the same Japan before, you now have four different time periods to choose from, as well as the Mongol scenario. New units are the battlefield ninja, the kensai warrior, the crossbow ashinguru (only in the Mongol scenario!)and the naginato cavalry. A big plus is that the buildings are cheaper to build and go up much quickly--no more 16-season citadels! The rebels are slightly more aggressive. Hojo isn't the Big Bad anymore. In many of the scenarios I've played, this clan gets bumped off early. The emassaries are much more useful now. They not only can propose more effective alliances, but can bribe other units! Ports now appear visible on the map so you know which clans have sea power or not. This is pivotal, because you can send a spy, shinobae, or ninja into someone's port and then invade next turn. As far as the tactical goes, I never had a problem with it before, since I'm not that good at the tactical part anyhow--so I have no complaints. If anything the graphics are more colorful and improved. As for the Mongol scenario, it was kind of disappointing for me. If you play the Mongols, it will be easy to win, even on hard level. If you play Hojo, prepare to get b***h slapped across the country. I would have liked to have seen the Mongols get integrated into the regular game and get made as part of a clan choice. Still, y
u can't have everything, can you?
Rating: 
Summary: LAPTOP owners beware!
Review: The other laptop owning reviewers are correct. This game constantly CRASHES on my laptop. My system more than meets the minimum system requirements. I have everything listed on the box cover but I cannot go into the campaign menu for more than 10 minutes before the game just crashes. It doesn't crash my Windows XP, it just shuts down the game and you lose everything you've built up to that point. It's infuriating. And it seems I'm not alone. At the very least it is false advertising and there should be some way for us to get our money back. It's also a great shame because from what I have seen it does look like a very good game. "Creative Assembly" what the hell is wrong with you? Isn't it standard procedure to test your software on every type of target platform on which your customer base are likely to run it? Isn't that Basic Software Development for Dummies? Why don't you sit down, install a debug version of this game on a laptop running XP, and then when it inevitably crashes use your Developer Studio debugger to find the damn problem and release a patch for us poor saps who were suckered into buying your game that won't run on our systems even though your advertising says it will. Otherwise I will never purchase another thing from Creative Assembly.
Rating: 
Summary: OK
Review: I dont think that Viking Invasion is as good as the Medieval but it adds new units and new features to the original game; not the Viking Invasion part, but the normal Medieval part becomes great after intalling this expansion.
Rating: 
Summary: Good Game, But Too Tedious
Review: I play this game at the strategic level (i.e., I let the computer fight the tactical battles). Played this way, the game is the kind I like. However, the people who produced this game need to put some more thought into managing the armies, navies, keeps, and countries. Essentially, it's a problem of status changes. For instance, each country has two build queues (infrastructure and units). When something from those queues finishes, the game pops up a notice during the End of Year (EOY) processing. However, those pop-ups are just that: you accept the message and off the game goes with more EOY stuff (and more messages). When you finally get around to being able to interact, you have no idea what's done and you have to check every country to figure out if you have a queue to fill. What the game needs is for you to go to those build queues from the pop-up message and set up the next item (or check that the remainder of the queued items are still what you want to build). Then the EOY process could continue to the next such message. By military status changes, I mean when a unit impinges on your viewable space. For instance, if you've got naval units in a sea and an enemy plops a newly built ship right next to you, the game doesn't let you know. Ditto for land units. There are no little colored dots on the mini-map for you to see at a glance either. You have to manually scroll the main map across the whole of Europe and look for enemy units. This gets very tedious, very quickly. For diplomacy, a country can go to war against you, and the first inkling you have of such a status change is that you're suddenly in battles. Also, there's no easy way to initiate diplomacy with a country. You have to find the foreign leader on the map (no little dots or anything shows where he is) and drop one of your emissaries on him to start things rolling. If that leader is in some are that you can't see troops in, then you're SOL. Also, and this is a pretty big problem, trade via ships is very badly designed. Trade is mostly transparent. What you have to do is set up a chain of ships from one port to another (and all spaces in between). As long as an enemy hasn't sunk a ship (or is just sitting next to one of your ships (in wartime), everything's fine. But, if that chain gets broken, trade stops. I'm sorry. But, trade shouldn't work that way. It should be set up so that if you control the ports at both ends, then the ships will travel between them. Maybe they'll be intercepted en-route and sunk. That's fine. But, this chain-of-ships thing is silly. There are other problems, but what they all add up to is an overly tedious game. With a little more thought, Activision could have had an excellent game here. However, as is, it's merely ok.
Rating:
Summary: more greatness added to an already great game
Review: I have been playing Total War since the time of Shogun: TW. It set the standard for strategy games. Then we got Medieval: TW. WOW, that was an even greater game than its predecessor. Now we have an excellent expansion to burn up medieval Europe with. Though the viking campaign takes place beginning in 793 AD, you still can play the original campaign with new units and factions. Diplomacy is still the same, as well as the micromanaging. The best addition is the prebattle screen. Here you can see your forces and reinforcments you will have access to, as well as your enemies. This allows for much better battle preperations. I highly recommend this little add on to any Medieval fan. You will not be let down.
Rating:
Summary: In a class of its own...
Review: You could buy this game simply for its fantastic 3-D battles alone and it would be impressive. However, just as exciting is the "bigger picture" strategy where you get to see your faction's color spread across Europe and the Mediterranean coast. Each faction plays differently, so that the Turks and the Mongols favor horse archers that harass and wear down enemy units while the French and the Germans prefer the impressive charge of the knights. The sheer number of different factions available gives this game staying power, because not all nations are created equally and some starting positions are harder than others. If you still doubt whether or not to get this game I would DEFINETLY head down to TOTALWAR.com and their downloads page. Check out their playable demo which is basically a battle tutorial to teach you how to fight in Medieval: Total War. The demo ends with the fantastic historical battle of Jaffa between Saladin and King Richard the Lionhearted. Multiplayer is great too, because you get to test your generalship against flesh and blood opponents, who are much craftier (and sometimes more foolish) than the computer can be. Playing as part of a team can be an excellent way to participate in a gigantic battle! Best of all, Creative Assembly is hard at work producing the sequel to this game, Rome: Total War! The soldiers in that game will be in full 3-D! You can check that game out at totalwar.com as well. But Rome won't be out for a while, so in the meantime definitely check out Medieval: Total War and its expansion pack Viking: Total War.
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