The Total War series has created a whole new genre of its own, mixing board game-style turn based strategy on a grand scale with real-time battles using massive armies drawn from the annals of history. The latest incarnation, Medieval 2: Total War is still camping the tail end of many PC sales charts, almost an year after release, proving a wide appeal far beyond the usual hardcore gamer. As with the previous Total War games, an expansion was inevitable - enter Medieval 2: Total War Kingdoms.

The gameplay of the Total War series hasn't really changed that much over the years - if you take a look at Shogun: Total War today, and compare it to this expansion pack, all the changes have been evolutionary. Along the way, the graphics moved from sprite-based units to full 3D models, the board game part expanded greatly and the battles grew from simple open ground engagements to all kinds of settings, including full scale sieges with massive fortresses and numerous different siege engines.

A number of different units has also gone through the roof along the years, and today there are so many different unit types, among the dozens of factions available in Medieval 2: Total War, that I'm sure the developers themselves have already lost count. However, under all that evolutionary expansion of the scope of the game, the underlying game concept has stayed true to the original.Real-time battles are all still about matching different units to create favorable engagements, and ensure that all the pieces fit and infantry, missile units and cavalry support each other while breaking up enemy formations.

Expansion additions

The Kingdoms expansion adds four new campaigns - Americas, Britannia, Teutonic and Crusades. Each campaign is actually a separate game; you can choose to install each separately and they launch from separate shortcuts. The expansion adds thirteen new playable factions, well over a hundred new unit types and numerous small twists to tailor the gameplay for each campaign. Several old factions also make a comeback.

On the packaging, the game box also claims "Controllable Reinforcement Armies" as a feature. The AI-controlled reinforcement generals in Medieval 2: Total War tended to mindlessly charge at the front of their armies, causing unfortunate deaths in battle and there was no way to direct them. Technically, now you can control them, but the controllability added is very limited - AI still controls the manoeuvres and all you can do is to set the reinforcement army to aggressive, defensive or stand-off posture. This is an improvement, but far from what people might expect.

Americas

The Americas campaign concentrates on Spain taking on the natives of the Americas. Spain, Aztecs, Mayans and Apachean Tribes are initially playable, and Chicimeca, Tlaxcalans and Tarascans can be unlocked. France and England also make an appearance as non-playable factions in the conflict, arriving to the area during the scenario.

Technologically Spain is clearly superior to the native tribes, but the numbers are just as clearly against them. Funding is also tight, and the only real way to keep your head above the water is to complete missions, gain prestige and put the mission reward money and the awarded Conquistadors into good use. While the weaker rebel tribes are easy to roll over, the major factions are to be taken seriously - it doesn't matter if you have plate armor and muskets if you are facing a faction with armies numbering more than ten times your own forces.

Sadly, the Total War combat system isn't really designed for battles that are numerically lopsided as there is a cap on number of units you can field. Yes, if you let your guard down you can get overrun by numerous huge low-tech armies attacking you on multiple fronts, but once you get your defenses to a reasonable level, your "main army" can easily match what the enemy can field in numbers, and you have clear technological advantage. It's still not an easy campaign as it's not uncommon to end up fighting against everyone in the new world.

Playing as natives gives you the other side of the coin - if you can unite the native factions together, you can push the invaders back to the ocean. The Americas campaign offers some unique features, such as the Apache ability to declare Warpath (similar to Jihad), and the ability to learn the use technology from the invading forces - for example, learning to use firearms by first fighting against musketeers. Regardless, even with the unit types opened during the campaign, the natives have a very limited tech tree, and the game pretty much expects you to fight by zerging with multiple massive armies consisting mostly of cheap cannon fodder.

Britannia

The British Isles are a nice, relatively small area for a campaign with Irish, Welsh, Scottish and English armies mixing it up with some Norwegian Viking plunderers thrown in for a good measure. Each side has very different starting positions - the English have the largest land area and the latest military tech, but face internal problems with revolting barons that can split up as their own faction (The Baron's Alliance). They also don't exactly get along that well with anyone - a bit like Spain in the Americas campaign, just without the huge numerical disparities.

The Welsh, are, well, Welsh with a teeny piece of land and more ambitions than resources, and the Irish just want to kick English out of their island. Scottish clans mostly end up bashing the English, while trying to fend off the invading Norwegian fleets. Although things are initially stacked so that England is the primary target for most of the other factions, there is plenty of room for creative diplomacy as well.

Overall, the Britannia campaign feels more polished and fun when compared to the zerg-fests of the Americas. Historical characters also make an appearance from time to time, but they do not have the "Hero" character abilities of the Crusades campaign. Britannia being a set of islands means that naval units play an important part. It also features more siege battles as the landscape is dotted with permanent forts - some with actual moats (another feature added in the Kingdoms expansion).

Crusades

Chronicling the early bits of the still-brewing conflict between Christianity and Islam in the middle-east, the Crusades campaign has European knights in the form of Kingdom of Jerusalem and Antioch locked in bloody war against Turkish and Egyptian factions. The Byzantine Empire is also playable; non-playable sides in the conflict include Venice, France, England and the Mongols, keeping things interested in the eastern borders of the area.

Crusades campaign features "Hero" characters - named leaders of each faction with special abilities usable in the real time battles. These heroes include such notable historical characters as Richard the Lionheart and Philip II Augustus. Each faction also starts out with a special "power center" region (Jerusalem, Antioch, Constantinople, Baghdad and Cairo). As this region is the only place to recruit certain elite troops, loss of the faction's power center causes great shifts in the balance of power in the region and can trigger reinforcements being sent to recapture the region. Control of enemy power center is usually also listed as a victory condition for the factions.

While there are initially less fortifications around the middle-east, generals can construct additional permanent forts that can support a number of garrisoned troops without upkeep funding. Each faction can build forts only in their own territory, but these forts can be captured and should they end up under enemy control, they will affect the income from the surrounding region.

Crusades is probably the most clear-cut campaign diplomatically - two Christian factions fighting two Islamic factions, both bent on bashing each other's skulls to dust in the name of their favorite deity. Byzantine Empire mixes things up a little, but in some ways they feel like the odd man out in this conflict.

Teutonic Order

The fourth part of the expansion is the Teutonic Campaign. If you are not a history buff, you might go "Teutonic...who?", so to clear things up, the Order was a faction of European knights who set out to re-educate the pagans of the northern Europe around the Baltic Sea. The campaign features a small but well-armed Teutonic army forcibly converting the Lithuanian Pagan state, with Denmark and Novgorod appearing as other playable factions. Additionally you can unlock the Holy Roman Empire and Poland for play in this campaign. Non-playable factions feature Norway (with the possibility that Denmark will form the Kalmar Union with Norway during the campaign) and the Mongols.

The campaign also features random appearance of additional European Crusader armies controllable by the Teutonic Order. These armies are on a mission to butcher some Pagans, and offer great monetary rewards if you help them in their quest (and keep them alive). On the flipside, Lithuanian council of nobles dishes out similar rewards for killing them, painting a nice crosshair on their already cross-bearing chests.

Hanseatic League also makes an appearance. They are not a faction, but are present in five regions, and whoever controls these regions have a chance that they will be offered the Hanseatic League Headquarters - a special building offering financial benefits to the faction.

Each major side also has a few special features. The Teutonic Order doesn't have the usual family tree; this makes them less vulnerable to assassinations, as there will always be a line of succession - when the faction leader dies, the most able general available will rise to be the new faction leader. The Order is also mostly limited to building fortresses and citadels, and civilian settlements are limited to the city level. This means the only way to keep the finances out of red is to source additional funds - for example by plundering enemy cities and assisting the adventuring crusaders for the rewards they offer.

Lithuanians initially field a couple of special Pagan unit types, and are limited to city and castle level settlements with the special ability to build several different Pagan temples. During the campaign, Lithuanians also have the option of converting to Christianity; this will cause civil unrest and loss of the Pagan units and buildings, but in return it will unlock new building options, and ease tensions with the surrounding Christian factions.

Visuals and hardware requirements unchanged

The expansion uses the same engine, and the requirements on the box are identical to Medieval 2: Total War. The packaging adds new "recommended hardware", which appear to be pretty close to YouGamers minimum recommendation. In any case, even a fairly old PC will run the game fine on medium settings, and if you go down to the lowest settings and drop the resolution, even the listed minimum will run the game - we just can't recommend it as the performance and the visuals will be compromised too far.

As the new campaign maps are smaller than the huge map used in Medieval 2: Total War, late game performance problems on marginal systems are not such an issue any more. The game still enjoys a healthy amount of CPU power, both in real time battles and in the strategy map, and 1GB of system RAM is strongly suggested as a practical minimum; the video card only affects the level of extra details you can turn on.

As Kingdoms is a strategy title, smooth frame rate is not that essential, and the game remains perfectly playable at around 20 fps. This is a good thing, as bumping up every setting to maximum causes the frame rate to hover around 15-20 fps even with a ATI Radeon HD 2900XT - so there are plenty of things to render even for the high-end cards.

Now it must be said that most of the shiny details you can turn on with the top end systems don't really affect the game one bit, as the game can't be played while zoomed up so close that you could actually see the detail you get at maximum settings. While the medium settings may look a bit crude when zoomed close up, it doesn't really affect the gameplay and the YouGamers recommendations take this into account. The YouGamers minimum recommended system (a 3GHz CPU system with 128MB ATI Radeon X1600 or NVIDIA GeForce 6600 allows you to play the game with medium details, with occasional slowdowns during the biggest battles involving large cities.

Our recommended system (3.8GHz with a 256MB ATI Radeon X1950 Pro or NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT lets you bump up the visuals close to maximum in general play, again with the disclaimer that you may have to drop the visuals a bit during large battles in huge cities. You should also ensure you have plenty of hard drive space - the full installation (Medieval 2: Total War and all four Kingdoms campaigns) eats up a whopping 12 GB. As a compromise you can install each campaign separately if you are low on disk space, so technically you can fit the game in 9 GB when playing just one campaign.

Solid Expansion

Medieval 2: Total War Kingdoms is a very good expansion pack, offering great value for money - it's effectively four new Total War games in one package, each being different in their own way, yet based on the tried and true Medieval 2: Total War core game. The campaigns are smaller in scope when compared to the base game, but in my books this is a big improvement. While it was great that M2: TW offered the full complexity of the whole Europe and nearby regions, it was just so large and complicated that late game situations tended to get out of hand. No such problems here - the restricted area and limited number of factions keep the game manageable throughout the campaign.

The expansion also adds hotseat multiplayer, an oft-requested option, but to me it felt pointless, as the 3D real-time battles are lost. As there is no way to do a two-player real-time battle on one computer, the game resorts to auto-resolving all battles in this mode; all you are left with is the turn-based boardgame portion of the game.

The expansion requires Medieval 2: Total War to play, and it should be noted that retail copies of the expansion do not work with the digital download versions available from services such as Direct2Drive or Steam. The same is true the other way around - if your Medieval 2: Total War is a retail copy, it won't cooperate with a digital download version of Kingdoms.

In short, the expansion is a massive load of new content for those who already love the Total War series. It concentrates on further evolving and refining the tried and true formula, and the only thing that may possibly draw new players is the fact that the new campaigns are more manageable in size. There is still tons of content here - so much that I'm freely admitting that completely exploring everything offered by the four campaigns in the confines of our review schedules together with the hardware testing YouGamers does was simply unfeasible in this case, but even in the limited time available it became abundantly clear that the Total War series is as strong as ever, and Kingdoms will keep you busy for a long time - probably until Empire: Total War appears, scheduled to arrive late 2008.