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.
