"While Medieval II: Total War is almost 20 years old, it remains one of the best titles in the history of the Total War franchise and is as fun to play in 2025 as in 2006!"
Singleplayer.
PvP Multiplayer.
In 2018, The Creative Assembly rebranded all of its older titles to use the naming convention it first adopted in 2016 with the release of Total War: Warhammer. This saw Medieval II: Total War rebranded as Total War: Medieval II.
However, for this review, we will call Medieval II: Total War by its original name, despite it no longer being sold under that title except for second-hand physical copies from almost twenty years ago.
While we now live in an age where hardware is growing ever more powerful and cloud computing is available to offload some of the strain where needed, such as recent Microsoft Flight Simulator releases, back when Medieval II: Total War, that was simply not the case.
The developers handled the issue of making the world feel massive perfectly by dividing it into manageable chunks.
Each campaign focuses on a different area of national or global domination and often different periods, allowing players to deal with everything from Viking invasions to the settlement of the New World.
Unfortunately, Empire Total War would try to present a unified world too soon before the developers were forced to revert to the system used in Medieval II: Total War, at least until the release of Mortal Empires (as part of Total War: Warhammer) which saw the Warhammer world, and all of its factions become playable for the first time.
But that is a story for another day, I mean review!
Medieval II: Total War built upon the rock-solid foundation of Rome: Total War by introducing various mechanics and features that made moment-to-moment gameplay more enjoyable, such as the ability to merge armies quickly, new ways to conduct diplomacy, and enhanced camera controls, and various performance and visual improvements to real-time battles.
While the series has come a long way since Medieval II: Total War, it was, in many ways, the first title in the series to have all of the bare minimum requirements to be 100% enjoyable in 2025 without the need to look through rose-coloured glasses.
Campaigns in Medieval II: Total War are the perfect length, as they allow players to finish most in less than 8 hours (a single day if you have the time!), and if you are eager for more, you can try a new faction or campaign, this is a great approach, which most games in the series have followed one way or another, except for Empire: Total War
While Medieval II: Total War occasionally suffers from performance issues due to its creation to run on powerful single-threaded CPUs, it does utilise a GPU much better than some older titles. While FPS does drop at times, for the most part, it is highly playable, if not a rock-solid 60FPS, which should be a bare minimum considering the game’s age.
The Medieval II: Total War community remains active after almost 20 years. There are dozens of impressive total conversion modes available, allowing players to engage in battles across various settings, including Middle Earth, Azeroth, and Westeros,In addition to hundreds of other mods which add new units, characters, mechanics, maps and more.
Medieval II: Total War is a 4x strategy video game developed by The Creative Assembly and published by Sega, it was released on 10 November 2006 and retails for $24.99.
The following peripherals are officially supported:
Medieval II: Total War is rated PEGI 16+ and contains:
While Medieval II: Total War was not my first Total War game, and it was certainly not my last (having played almost every game released since), it is without a doubt my favourite Total War game and one that I have completed multiple times, having done so every couple of years since picking it up again from Steam after having lost my original DVDs many years ago.
While Medieval II: Total War may not be the newest game, and it would benefit greatly from quality-of-life changes introduced in later titles, it is undoubtedly still worth playing in 2025 and beyond, and for that reason, I highly recommend it.
We found Medieval II: Total War to be a great game, meaning it delivers a memorable experience with only minor imperfections that don't detract from the overall enjoyment of the game.
