The Creative Assembly promised to bring new things into the game. They succeeded in creating only a beautiful graphic but the core of the game remained the same. No major changes took place so the fans can be happy. You will still be able to use the rock-paper-scissor tactics to win the battles. As you advance into the game, you will become somehow bored of the same tactics used by the enemy and will choose the computer to autoresolve the outcome.

Sometimes you will see an unbalanced enemy army with most of the troops cavalry or just infantry and with a proper tactics you could decimate it. You could also see the AI pushing it's infantry forward with no cavalry support, allowing you to quickly exterminate them and concentrate on the remaining troops. As you advance on the game, powerful troops and support units will become available and the game will become more or less exciting, depending if you already are bored or still thrilled about the game.

The blacksmiths built into the settlements will allow you to upgrade your army's armor up to the full plate armor, while the swordsman guild will allow you to give your man better weapons. To upgrade your troops you will have to retrain them and this takes time because only 3 troops can be recruited/upgraded into a settlement per turn so a certain strategy must be considered.

When attacking or defending the cities, the graphics displays a beautiful fight with siege units creating havok on the troops or turning the enemy's walls and towers into debris, with troops thrown into the air when a projectile hits the walls or the ground. The troops look very good, with their plate armor and their shiny weapons, with cavalry ready to smash the infantry and decimate the routing troops. Each troops looks unique and this gives the game a special flavor.

Perhaps some of you will be tempted to auto-resolve the battles to remain concentrated on the tactical map but by doing this you will miss a big part of the Medieval 2 experience, maybe the most pleased and the most rewarding.

As I said, the graphics are very good and this is a good thing because this means that the developers are evolving and improving the game. But this comes with a drawback. Most of the latest games lack optimization, counting on the player's to upgrade its machine to play the game. Medieval 2 falls into this category but not entirely. The game can be played well even on some slower machines but there is still place for optimization. I had to reduce the shadows to play a fluent game and I have to admit that I own a powerful computer so Creative would better work on optimizing on the following updates.

Regarding the sound, Medieval 2 remains at the top level that was imposed by the previous titles. The sound effects are excellent and you can feel the cannons and the cavalry march into the poor infantry taken by surprise. You can hear the walls crushing and the tower falling down but I couldn't hear any wind blowing.