Medieval II: Total War

I got this game for "free in 2026", why should I or anyone else bother with a review for this 20 years old game now? Well that's what I'm about to tell you because this isn't really a review but just telling you the state of things about this game in the mid year of 2026 because the game has got another big "life expansion support". Firstly I own the game physical DVD disc from 2006 which is the original release, but I never registered it on steam, not back then and also not during the (mid) 2010s , and oh I also never owned the actual Kingdoms expansion, so in the 2010s when the modding has generally moved into Kingdoms to be required for most of the mods I used the unofficial version of it. Why am I telling you this? Well because after those era the steam version of the game and it's expansion got merged inti one as the definitive edition, but I didn't pay any attention to it also partly due to my lost of interest in the franchise, but then to my surprise earlier this year I just randomly decided to I entered my disc keynto steam and voila they gave me the definitive edition despite only owning the original game. Then comes the bigger surprise when I found out that for both Rome total war and Medieval 2 total war, there's this big community made game engine overhaul mods called REX and M2EX respectively that have done wonders to both games, now the game can actually run at hundreds of frame rates in modern gaming PC and then they add many modern features from more recent total war games baked into the engine like modern camera style, you can now rotate the campaign map in RTW/M2TW like with modern TW games, that ranged units can have their actual fire range indicator visible during the battles, they also supposedly fix some of the old AI and animations issues etc... But the biggest thing about it is 2 things : 1. You can run already existing mods on top of REX and M2EX, so yeahnyou can run LOTR mod on top of M2EX mod with absolutely no need to update the old mods (at least the biggest and most well known ones). 2. The claimed to have broken many of the old engine hardcoded limitations for the mods like the maximum factions count, maximum provinces count, maximum different units count, maximum religions number count etc... so now theoretically nodders cannmake something like medieval 2 total war with a map covering the entire old worlds (from Japan to Portugal for example) with all their factions and units. . In theory, because nobody has actually done it properly yet. So there's a renaissance for this game and Rome, and this is amazing especially with the growing negativity that has risen with the recent M3TW development news where somehow Creative Assembly just keep snatching defeats just like with all their recent historical TW games. So at least we can have this M2EX and their upcoming even more expanded mods than ever before. Intold you this isn't a review of the game, LoL.

It's an old game but it still holds up well. Might not look good now but back in it's day it was beautiful. I play it because it's good and nostalgic. I bought this on disc when I was a young boy and put in hundreds of late night hours; just one more turn. Still have the disc too. Steam and Sage were awesome to let people with disc copies, add it to there Steam account and download it from Steam instead of needing the disc. I probably have 1000 hours in this. One thing that does stink is frame drops during physics like a wall coming down. I'll get well over 100 fps but as soon as a wall is coming down, frames drop to the low 20s or even lower, but then it's back to normal in a couple of seconds. Not sure why it's like this.

This remains in my (slightly biased) opinion THE classic total war. It lacks the depth of its successors, and its graphics can date it up close, but few other TW games feel so "pure" to me. Easy to pick up and play, unit types, army composition, and progression are intuitive and fun to do. The variation between different regions encourages playing over and over again despite the relatively limited scope. Rome is the "Super Mario Bros." of Total War, the game that made them big. Medieval 2 is its "Super Mario World", the peak of the classic formula.