A Strategy game featuring a lot of Strategic elements and Variations and of course: War!
The Game play:
On the normal Map, its turn based strategy meaning you move your units in turns then the AI factions' gets to play. You've got a lot of units; some are unique to a certain faction while others are common. You can build upgrades; there are 2 types of settlements, Towns and Castles. Towns are your Money makers and Castles are the War factories. There's more to do in a Turn, you've got Spies. If they are experienced enough they can show you info on rival settlements and may even open the gates incase you siege that settlement. Assassins can save you a lot of trouble by eliminating key units or sabotaging production. Princess which when used probably can make you and your worst enemy into best friends. Diplomats do the same except they are used to abuse your rivals (or in a bad scenario to buy you time). Merchants are secondary money makers; however you can use them to seize rival merchants. And of course there are Priests; basically it's another mission to get your faction's priest to be the Pope, which will make life much easier. When an army clashes with an enemy army, or a siege defense takes place the game Engine 'changes' into a real-time sword clashing. You get to arrange your troops on the battlefield for max management and then you fight, you can skip and let the AI resolve the battle, but do this when your ratio is at least 2:1.
The Performance:
The game is Heavy, and eats Ram like there's no tomorrow. The AI is very lame sometimes, like it should know when it's losing and request a ceasefire, or at least agree for one! The pope sometimes orders you to stop attacking a certain faction; however that faction can freely attack you! This isn't cool. Hopefully these will be fixed in the upcoming Patches.
Sound:
The Music is Purely Medieval, Ballad and Chanting. Which melds well in Total war, The Voices are well performed as well as the Morale raising speech. With different accents from other factions makes for an overall fun.
Value: To be honest the first 50 – 70 Turns would be very interesting and fun to play, however once you start to expand (like 35 settlements) the game will become hard and the public order will worsen. So I would recommend playing a long game once or so. There are a lot of factions to play with each with its own Strengths and weaknesses. You can unlock even more factions after you finish the Campaign once.
Bottom line:
Any Battle Hardened Strategy Player Will appreciates what Medieval 2 has to Offer.