The good part: It is a classic game, in the like of the settlers but not completely. Set around the 7th to 8th century, filled with mythic creatures and Monthy Python references, I find the game a charming treat for my eyes and ears. The bad: The weakest part of this game is the lenght of the campaign. Almost half of the missions are build up your base from nothing which is a lenghty process. The figthing parts often feel like a chore but luckily you can cheese the system with time and a bit of effort. Not to mention that the game is rather easygoing so, WHEN your whole army perishes in a foolhardy assault it is usually not the end of the world and you have time to rebuild... usually.
Since this is a late medieval/renessaince life simmulator you can do quite a lot in this game. Go to the pub have a drink, sit down and chat, take a bath, dance with your lover or saucy secret. Build a empire through shrew trade agreements, producing new valuables to sell, exploting your workers and such. If that was not enough you can take part in political games and climb the ladder to become the head of the town to set new laws and taxes, wright the wrongs that were done to you by rivals and naturally use the town coffer as your own as you embezle everything to stay in power. This series had a rough start. Compared to the prequel, Europe: The Guilds this is a more limited game with a smaller scope but maybe that is what really caught my eye and heart over all these years. Unfortunately it is still plagued by errors, sometimes game breaking ones that the fan patches and mods can't fix. (At least in my case they did not work as intended.) Things as major as save corruptions, wierd graphical glitches, audio bugs where sound effects keep playing over and over again... The most crucial part the multiplayer which is THE way to play this game is the one that got all of the problems! The numerous times the game decided that the session is OOS(out of sync) and we had to restart the program only to find out that we could not load the multiplayer saves was a kick in the balls, ESPECIALLY when you were playing on it for in game decades. So as the game mentions in a tip save often and use different savefiles. The graphics are dated even back when the vanilla Guild 2 first came out it was enough to convey what was going on. This did not change luckily, it looks dated but you can atleast laugh at it.
