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- 1C Entertainment
- 1C Entertainment
- 1C Entertainment
- 1C Entertainment
Real Warfare II: Northern Crusades
Released On: Nov 18, 2011
Metascore
Available after 4 critic reviews
7.0
Where to Buy
Where to Buy
All Platforms
An engaging and enjoyable take on medieval strategy. [Feb 2012, p.107]
We're off the opinion that the worst that can happen to a game is it being uninspiring – Northern Crusades isn't a bad game, but neither is it a particularly good game. It simply is and it's hard to give a passionate answer either way as to whether it's worth your time.
User Score
Mixed or Average
Based on 13 User Ratings
7.0
62% Positive
8 Ratings
8 Ratings
15% Mixed
2 Ratings
2 Ratings
23% Negative
3 Ratings
3 Ratings
User Score
Mixed or Average
Based on 13 User Ratings
7.0
62% Positive
8 Ratings
8 Ratings
15% Mixed
2 Ratings
2 Ratings
23% Negative
3 Ratings
3 Ratings
Game is the best strategy I've ever played since HoMM3 and Shogun. I am really enjoying the medieval world in RW2 and tactical battles... I am old fan of strategic games and I highly recommend this game to everyone! I really like the graphics in this game, good mix of brutal medieval and dance of shadows and contrast. Tactical battles are difficult at the first glance, but there is just a need to get used to them. But the main reason why I put 10 of 10 - because I really want to lunch this game just after I switch my PC on.
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PC
Real Warfare 2 relies heavily on gameplay gimmicks, eschewing some
crucial features that should have been a no-brainer to implement.
Good game , the battle is just like the previous title which has almost perfect system for historic tactical battles, it refined a bit and feels more fluid especially the camera control. The nice add to this title is the camapign map which is played like Mount & blade system, all in real time, where you can recruit & upgrade your army, and also trade and seige castles, and many other things. There are RPG elements which are good add, you can enhance your hero abilities and thus can be reflected on your army or other aspects of the game, siege battles are fine but could be better. Graphics and overall atmosphere are great for such theme.
However, the campaign map adds a lot as I mentioned previously, but the excution is really poor, the campign map feels so buggy, not realistic at all,for example robbers are like organized kingdom army that can crush you, the trade system feels unreal, the upgrade could be much better, and after sometimes you will feel extreamly bored from campaing and you just want to play those epic historic battles which were in Real Warfare 1242, thats why I would give 6 just because of the campaign, and I think if they make it like Total War game campaing but in real time it will be much better.
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PC
Good game with some nice visuals. The upgrade system and battle mechanics play rather well but the graphics are at best comparable to Medieval Total War 2. The main problem with this game is the large number of glitches and the fact that everything but the battles is UTTERLY BORING. This "game" is just battle, sell garbage, refit army, read poor dialog/nonsensical uninteresting story bits, new battle, crash, reload, sell garbage.... Since your not in control of the mission assignments and since battling outside the proscribed boundaries yields horrible cost/benefit ratios, i.e. you just took down a whole castle but hey this merchant caravan IS PACKING EVEN MORE guards and and elite units, one quickly grows very bored. Top it off with consistent "game engine error" crashes after every 2-3 battles which require you to reload and REPLAY the same battle this game is about 10 years past its expiration date because man does it STINK!
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PC
(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.
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PC
This game is easily the worst thirty dollars i spent (i think. pre-ordered on steam and got RW 1242. haven't played much of it). MW3 is worse, but i got that for christmas, luckily (no 60$ from me). Anyways, The things that killed me about it are, in a nutshell, Buggy, lvling does... what?, combat, economy, and THOSE FREAKIN ROBBERS!!! and a few other irksome things. going sequentially in order of mention, the bugs: when i first launch it from my desktop, the load pic comes up and... what? has it crashed? there are no moving parts on it at all. not exactly reassuring. its also takes a while to boot, so im left at my desk wondering if it crashed or not. when it does bott, im in the game, so on and so forth, i get into a fight, and the loading screens show up. No, it's not a tendency to crash, or obscenly long loading times that i hate. No, its that the screen fails to update the still images(as in, the game doesn't update the loading screen at all. Deosn't make sense, does it? example: loading screen pops up. rather than show you the progress of the load, its frozen, and the only way is to show progress is pressing the windows key. alot.), so i have to press the windows key at least 4 time every fight. not fun. the next thing: the lvling with no point (practically). so you're playing the game, you finish a fight AGAINST ALL ODDS(more on that later) and you lvl up. so a screen pops up and you see a bunch of stuff to spend a skill point or two in. how ever, none of them have any real use. taxmaster: increases taxes marginally. Warlord-or-something-similiar: decreases price of recruiting marginally. Pray before battle: increases morale ... marginally. see a pattern? Combat: hate hate hate hate HAAAATE! getting soldiers to move: after you tell them to do it, it takes five seconds to start diong it and the formation commands (wedge,line,etc.) rarely work. I have also rarely encountered a battle where i am grossly outmatched. another note: the game has a somewhat skewed perception of enemy strength relative to yours. lot's of units at half-strength when there are at least 2-3 time more units are apparently more dangerous than full strength units with a unit count equal to yours. Economy: ignorable, until you need to repair a unit after battle, which is all the time, thanks too those freakin robbers. it take alot to repair your special cavalry at the beggining of the game. and since i never got past the missionn where you had to take an enemy castle by sneaking in and opening the gate, i never got to expeirence the wrath off powerful unit repairs. And those ROBBERS keep stealing all the cash you really need. and kill a few units sometimes to. next to last theing: morale. before we get into it, lets talk about online multiplayer shooters. your team is winning by alot. the other team has basically nothing at all. then they win. its usually because all of the good players on your team leave, other team gets good players, etc. In RW2NC, there is morale. if you are winning, but one of your units is getting beaten like there is no tommorrow, they will run away. then that sets off a chain reaction that causes you to lose. last thing: FREAKIN ROBBERS!!! i never got to a point of the game were i could beat them. never. They steal all my gold, kill units occasianaly if i dont give them my gold, if i try to fight them, they were always overpowered, and they are everywhere. EVERYEWHERE. THE END
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PC
Summary Real Warfare 2: Northern Crusades is the next installment in this series of realistic real-time strategy games covering various periods in the development of the present day civilization from the Middle Ages to today. This new title helps players witness the key events in the history of the Teutonic Order in 13th century, namely conquer...
Platforms:
- PC
Initial Release Date: Nov 18, 2011
Developer:
- Unicorn Games Studio
Publisher: 1C Entertainment
Genres:
