Some four years ago, Europa 1400: The Guild arrived, a combination of RPG and strategy game that enabled you to live a virtual life back in the middle ages, climbing the ladder of medieval wealth and politics. While the game was kind of rough around the edges - most of your time was spent staring at static screens of st💦atistics and figures - it was still surprisingly unique and really deserved a lot more attention than it got.

Sorry to say, The Guild 2 isn't even that good. Admittedly, it's a lot more graphically interesting than the original, with fully 3D towns packed with virtual inhabitants scurrying to and fro as they busi🐽ly go about their lives. The music is excellent, and there's a lot of digitized speech and ambient sound to seꦰt the mood.

There are also a lot of problems. For one, there really just aren't a whole lot of choices or options. You start by creating a character (oddly for a game set in the Middle Ages, whether you choose to play as a man or woman has zero effect, except in choice of marriage partners - no Massachusetts weddings here), limited to one of four basic classes: patron💛, craftsman, scholar, and rogue. Each class has its subd♔ivisions - a scholar can choose being a priest or an alchemist, for example - and these are chosen mostly by which kind of buildings you buy and in which areas you concentrate your skills as you earn them.