Fields of Glory II Medieval
A solid but safe tabletop-style treat.
This is a wargamer’s wargame. There’s no nice music. The graphics are barebones. The UI is pretty basic. You’ll want to memorise hotkeys. What there is are 50+ hours of historical scenarios and campaigns. The famous battles give you a prearranged battlefield and let you pick a side, then customise it a bit. The campaigns give you good context on a fixed route while still letting you make decisions about your army’s composition.
Multiplayer is handled in the same asynchronous style as past Field of Glory games, which is disappointing and frustrating if you want to finish a match in one sitting. It’s just functional enough if you can only sit down to play for 15 minutes at a time. Very unimpressive and underwhelming.
FOG II: Medieval’s battles focus on historical simulation over clever or puzzle-like tactics scenarios. It delivers that in spades, with the kind of battles a history buff salivates over. They’re dynamic and unpredictable, forcing you into surprising scenarios when troops unexpectedly flee or the enemy makes a surge. You use those rules to take an array of historical factions through the scenarios.
Battles take a long time to play because they’re a medieval meatgrinder. Troops lock each other into melee, only sometimes falling back or escaping from that melee due to morale breaking or combat results – neither of which are something you particularly have control over once the brawl begins.
That aside, some of the game just doesn’t feel properly medieval. The time period starts at 1040 and runs to 1270, stopping just short of the grandiose 14th century finale of armoured knights, longbows, and mercenary crossbowmen. The ruleset’s emphasis on flanking manoeuvres over numerical advantage makes a lot of sense in the ancients period, but it feels silly when three units of elite infantry can’t make a squad of enemy recruits flee in a single simultaneous assault.
JON BOLDING The closest to a tabletop miniatures experience that you’ll get on the PC.