Recent reviews by Rem wake up

don't buy this game

i've been chat muted for years ♥♥♥♥ the ♥♥♥♥♥♥ devs no wonder their game is dead

Though aged, Medieval II is a classic and I think it still holds up in 2024.

Easily one of my favorite RPG games of all time. The focus on historical accuracy and depiction of real events, and yet the non linear nature of the game play which allows you to complete quests using various means of your choosing. Despite the bugs, none of which are game breaking (at least in my experience), This game is nothing short of a masterpiece.

worth

yes

I want to start this review by saying that I have been a fan of men of war for over 10 years, I have just about every game and ~1500 hours in MOWAS2 alone. I understand that those games too were plagued with some weird design choices and stupid AI. I would also like to say that I do like this game, I think it's fun and I will continue to play it and (usually) enjoy it. The models and textures are very well done and add a lot of flavor, the voice lines are well done, and the campaign is really fun. It is genuinely probably one of my favorite games at the moment.

However, it is plagued with some serious issues that really should not be a problem this late into development. The AI seems to have slightly more "realistic" pathfinding than Men of War, the vehicles take roads and so on, but if you aren't constantly paying attention to your units and micromanaging them then they will more often than not get stuck on some random entity, which is something that did happen in MoW but not nearly as much as it seems to happen in this game. Half the time if I order my towed artillery to move somewhere they don't even move and I have to enter direct control and do it myself. The AI also does not fare well in combat, units often don't engage in combat even when ordered and when using the attack ground option with artillery I sometimes have to do it 5 or 6 times before they actually listen or even do it in the direct control mode because they just refuse. Infantry combat is mostly up to RNG, and at times even your experienced infantry can repeatedly miss their shots while a random Soviet partisan domes your squad leader in the head with a rusty mosin. On top of that, if infantry is engaged while moving they will often just keep sprinting into the enemies line of fire and all get gunned down. It doesn't help that in multiplayer, people are really sweaty (obligatory "skill issue") and it is borderline unplayable for anyone who is playing against someone who memorized every single hotkey meanwhile you just got home from work and want to relax and play a game.

There are a lot of issues with the AI and those are just some of them, but I feel the need to explain that with heavy scripting, the game is perfectly fun. For me, I play a lot of the single player missions or ♥♥♥♥ around in the editor and the issue is usually when I decide to play multiplayer, skirmish, or conquest that the game can get extremely frustrating (again, skill issue). Firstly, why is there no reverse option for vehicles? It is really annoying when I have to micromanage all of my infantry from getting killed by a single HE round and at the same time I have to slowly right click right behind my vehicles for them to reverse out of a dangerous situation. You would think this would have been in the game by now considering it totes itself as being ultra realistic. In skirmish, you start the mission off with either no or a handful of infantry support units depending on which doctrine you pick before you start the game, which can be infuriating especially when you're trying to assault numerically superior entrenched infantry on a hill supported by mortars, machine guns, and tanks while you have some guys with rifles and a truck with a machine gun strapped to the back and little to no infantry or anti-tank support to speak of, which AGAIN, isn't realistic at all. And once again, this wouldn't be so bad if it weren't so difficult to utilize some of the features of the game like smoke grenades or even something as simple as making your units engage the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ enemy. It was also a weird decision to make most of the heavy weapons in the game have the same ranges. For some reason, mortars have to be in range of AT weapons to bombard the position, light AT guns have only a slightly lower range than the heavier ones, heavy artillery has surprisingly short range, etc. At least in the OG Men of War it would scale even if the ranges were ridiculously short. The devs also didn't even bother to make the units in skirmish remotely accurate to the period that any of the missions take place in. Also, why did they decide to remove the swastika from Finnish vehicles? I understand Germany to an extent (not really, considering it's supposed to be a realistic game) but the hakaristi was completely separate from the Nazis and was first used in 1918 after a plane was given to them by Sweden, the leader of which used the swastika as a personal symbol. If you don't want to show that ♥♥♥♥, then don't make a game about world war 2, it's that simple.

Again, the design choices are odd and there are more that i'm just not remembering right now, but DESPITE ALL OF THAT, I could forgive it. Most of this stuff can be fixed with mods which is really what made the Men of War series so great. But I can't forgive the devs for REPEATEDLY releasing an unfinished product. I bought Ostfront in December of 2021 so most of the campaign missions had been fixed but I know that some of them were unplayable when the game was released and clearly no one had play tested them. And now, with the Talvisota DLC there is more unpolished slop. Spelling errors, bugs, unplayable areas, even on the Bagration map the assets for bridge on the right aren't even put together properly. I couldn't even finish the last mission in the Talvisota DLC because for some reason the Germans stopped spawning after the second wave. It also seems like they forgot to put the Finnish skirmish mission in and it took them an extra day to put it into the game. They charge people 18 dollars for a DLC that isn't even finished. Not to mention several people have noted that the devs are extremely rude if you critique their product, even if it's for things that really shouldn't even be broken in the first place. I think it's ridiculous that we are expected to sit here and put up with the lack of effort by dev teams to release a polished and playable game. If you're going to make somebody get a completely unrelated game just to play it, then release an overpriced DLC that adds a lackluster faction with reskinned units at least make it finished.

In conclusion, if you're a long time fan of Men of War, are willing to spend the money on both Call to Arms and Ostfront, and can deal with dumb AI or you are just going to have fun in the editor like I normally do, then yes the game is fun. But the single player missions, the skirmish, conquest, and the multiplayer all have some serious problems and at this stage the devs should really be focusing on the core game issues like AI and quality of life and not releasing an extortionately priced unpolished DLC.

this is the most boring meet and ♥♥♥♥ game i've ever played

puke

I don't own it