The Guild 2

Similar to the Guild 1 it would be a wonderful game, if there wouldn't be so many bugs. After playing a few minutes I already stumbled over tons of missing translations, placeholder text over and over, german sound files playing in the english version and so on. Well, I could live with this, but after a few hours I tried to activate the AI for my business. It's just ridiculous how broken the AI is. First year it seems to work, then it started to send carts to the mines to get a few iron at a time when there is NONE left at the smithy, selling the goods stopped working as the AI sends the goods to the mines not to the market. My weapon smith stopped producing anything as there was no iron left. After building a mine myself it started to onload weapons and armor at my mine. It seems there wasn't even most basic testing involved before releasing the game. It's sad to see a game with such potential destroyed by game breaking bugs.

The Guild 2 takes the Medieval economic game from the first one, and adds a system where you have a personal avatar or three running around the game world, applying for positions on the town council, helping their business run, and challenging people to duels. Said avatars can level up, gaining perks as they go, so they are very easy to specialise. You can focus on charisma and become a political force, by smarming your way into persuading everyone to vote for them, or giving a speech in the street, making impressed onlookers join your religious denomination in droves. If you're of the more violent nature, you can make a combat-oriented family, back them up with Thieves' Guilds and Robber Hideouts, and wipe the other families off the map. This means that, while you're not micromanaging your businesses, a lot, you'll be spending a lot of time focusing on your characters, and the various cutscene-type events that happen when they, say, go on trial. This is the game at its best, and its worst. On top of the ones mentioned above, you can leisurely bribe and you charm your way out of what seems like an insurmountable number of charges against you in court. You can challenge someone to a duel, beat them to within an inch of their life while they're walking to the duelling square, and so ensure that your first hit in the duel will kill them, without getting charged for murder. But you can also watch as the game occasionally assigns the wrong voice to a character - same sex or no - or as your character clips through the town hall. An event cutscene will freak out halfway through, because if someone hates someone else in the same room, they will repeatedly scream insults at them, even if they have to stop their scripted dialogue to do so. There's horrendous lag once the map's population is on the rise. There's usually at least one thing going wrong on screen. If you're mostly here for the economic side, do yourself a favour and get the more stable first game instead.

You can entertain yourself with micromanaging and making your own storylines. I have spent countless hours on courting, making a family and then trying to put my family, one by one into seats of power. And when my loved ones were being killed off, spending all that time on vendettas, either brutally and directly, or with finesse and working in the backdrops, it can really be immersive. One huge drawback though, is, despite the highest difficulty levels, if you survive for long enough, the enemy families will stop making babies and they just die off. If youre into just creating something, a powerful and influential family, successful businesses and just playing around with your own imagination, its great fun, but if your main objective is eradicatio, youll probably be disappointed.

That is the question I raise to you! The Guild 1 was a classic! It was an engrossing sandbox simulator like no other. Then there was this rubbish. The Guild 2 was ill supported, buggy, some people found the game so broken as to be completely unplayable. If you plan on purchasing this please do yourself a favor and bring up the ol' Google and get your fingers ready to search for ways to make the game not crash on start and how to keep the game marginally playable at most times. I'm glad Gog has a money back guarantee. Still though, why soil the good reputation they have made for themselves and the developers who, honesty, should have just stopped at the Guild 1 expansion. I know I'm ranting more than reviewing, but wow... this game huh? Really?!?

buggy as all hell and fairly simplistic, but you can find a few hours of fun in this