The English under Henry III are in charge, but they’ve spread themselves too thin and the Welsh, Irish and Scots are beginning to hate their guts. Kingdoms gives you four.įirst up, Britain, 1258.

Most expansion packs give you one new twist on the original experience. And this is the key point in Kingdoms’ favour. What’s more, the campaigns chosen have given The Creative Assembly scope to experiment with new styles of play and new challenges. If Medieval 2 was all about the big, sweeping picture – the headlines of the middle ages News at Ten – then this is the in-depth analysis the game where you really get to grips with the workings of history. In other words, the rich, ocean-deep gameplay of Medieval 2 is intact. Even if you’re dealing with one small island group – the British Isles – you still have a lot of cities, armies and personalities to deal with. We do get some new areas – specifically the Americas and an expanded Holy Land – but Kingdoms is all about taking things down a little, and getting stuck in a smaller campaign fought over a shorter period with fewer combatants and clearer, more straightforward goals.ĭon’t get too hopeful if you found Medieval 2 a little overwhelming at times while Kingdoms is a little more approachable, the reduction in scale is accompanied by a rise in detail. It’s as if The Creative Assembly had decided to take a magnifying glass to the Medieval 2 map and concentrate on specific areas and specific points in history. So it might seem strange that, while an ordinary expansion pack would simply make the game bigger still or extend it into a new era, Kingdoms actually represents a reduction in scale. Covering economics, religion, diplomacy and military might, it’s one of the most comprehensive historical strategy games around. Here is a game where you can decide the fate of Europe’s biggest nations at some of the most vital points in their history, and fight wars that range across and beyond the continent itself. A major part of the appeal of Medieval 2 – and indeed of the whole Total War series – is its epic quality. The fact that it’s also one of the best is not entirely unconnected. In a way, Kingdoms is one of the most counter-intuitive expansion packs I’ve ever come across.

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