Medieval Wars: Strategy and Tactics Review

Imagine living in medieval times. Imagine going out to plough your fields or water your chickens (or whatever) every day, dressed in the obligatory studded leather and bits of armor, like you’re a member of a biker gang that rides muddy pigs instead of motorcycles. Imagine working in your field all day, the leather and the studs chafing like anything, and then having to go back to your house made of rubbish and bits of tree to eat a nourishing meal of mud sausage. Imagine you have to get up in the night to be sick, but you realize your whole house is the toilet. Imagine that when you get up in the morning somebody whose name you can’t even spell (you can’t read, thicko!) burns down your house and chops you into bits. Luckily, Medieval Wars: Strategy and Tactics simulates absolutely none of this.

It turns out that this decision works pretty well. Not only does the absence of mud sausage allow Medieval Wars to focus on its pared-down but rewarding turn-based strategy gameplay, but it also clears the stage for the stuff we actually like about medieval times, like Vikings and knights. And then more Vikings. Admittedly, the Vikings are merely pixel drawings of Vikings (often not wearing any shirts), just as everything else is represented by sprites, but they are nicely-drawn sprites. Better yet, underneath the not-so-medieval pixels lies a rock-paper-scissors system of units that you can combine and stack up to create armies with varying strengths and weaknesses, with armored and unarmored units lending different levels of pizzazz to your attempts to brutalize Europe.

And it is mostly Europe that you’ll be fighting over: from the ‘Excalibur’ campaign (and its history of English belligerence through the ages) to the Viking campaign (and its history of axe-happy beard-men) you’ll be sending armies on maneuvers through a rather pleasant province-by-province map of Europe’s most fighty regions. The map itself is simple but pleasingly-drawn, in a style that reminds me of both the venerable Medieval: Total War and the more recent Europa Universalis 3. It’s a nice touch that emphasizes the abstract nature of your role as a distant king watching the pieces move across the board. More than that, though, the actual system of maneuver, where you try to form fronts and trap enemy forces in pockets from which they cannot retreat – the threat of which can force an outflanked enemy to concede key strategic provinces – is a real delight. It might be a staple of the Strategy and Tactics series, but as staples go it’s more sweet potato than dull spud.

There were a few things that tempered my enjoyment of the game, the main one being that the campaigns do tend to feel more like a series of strategy puzzles rather than games of glorious conquest. The campaigns don’t really offer a developing narrative, even when you’re encouraged to develop your troops’ powers between scenarios – a moment of dissonance that surprised me a little. The puzzles are good, but I did feel that offering players the opportunity to play about with the long-term effects of things like reinforcements (and denying the same to your enemies) would have added a dash of spice to the hearty fare on offer. There’s also the small matter of over half the campaigns being offered as DLC (and at rather hefty prices) rather than being bundled with the game; I’d have been much more comfortable with the idea of paying for the game itself and having all the campaigns, instead of being left feeling like I’d played through a shareware version of the game.

But this is mostly nitpicking. Medieval Wars is a game that succeeds because it has a clear idea of what it wants to deliver to you – a simple yet elegant turn-based strategy game – and then goes and delivers it. There’s no tramping through acres of mud, no having to make things from bits of stick because you’re in the past, no wondering when someone is going to step up and invent the iPhone. There’s just a finely-executed slice of strategy, and the opportunity to look at some tiny pixel Vikings – proving that pretending to be in medieval times is far more fun than being in medieval times ever was.