The Guild 2 review

Some four years ago, Europa 1400: The Guild arrived, a combination of RPG and strategy game that enabled you to live a virtual life back in the middle ages, climbing the ladder of medieval wealth and politics. While the game was kind of rough around the edges - most of your time was spent staring at static screens of statistics and figures - it was still surprisingly unique and really deserved a lot more attention than it got.

Sorry to say, The Guild 2 isn't even that good. Admittedly, it's a lot more graphically interesting than the original, with fully 3D towns packed with virtual inhabitants scurrying to and fro as they busily go about their lives. The music is excellent, and there's a lot of digitized speech and ambient sound to set the mood.

There are also a lot of problems. For one, there really just aren't a whole lot of choices or options. You start by creating a character (oddly for a game set in the Middle Ages, whether you choose to play as a man or woman has zero effect, except in choice of marriage partners - no Massachusetts weddings here), limited to one of four basic classes: patron, craftsman, scholar, and rogue. Each class has its subdivisions - a scholar can choose being a priest or an alchemist, for example - and these are chosen mostly by which kind of buildings you buy and in which areas you concentrate your skills as you earn them.