Genre: Real-Time Strategy
Publisher: Take-Two Interactive
Developer: CatDaddy Games
Release Date: September 6, 2004

Now this is a beat I'm not sure how to dance to.

At first glance, Medieval Conquest looks a lot like your average real-time strategy fantasy game, other examples of which you can find peppering the shelves of every local game store in your area and possibly also lining the shelves at 7-11. It's a popular genre, is what I'm trying to say. Reading over some of the box text, though, paints a very different image of the game, one in which you will be called upon to maintain stores and hire on new characters, while constantly maintaining a complex economy in real time.

If there's two phrases that just don't fit into my world view when placed next to each other, it's "complex economy" and "real time." I know those words, but they don't mesh well with me. I'm game to trying, though.

The truth of the matter is that Medieval Conquest isn't so much a traditional Warcraft-esqe RTS game, as it is some sort of mutant kingdom micromanaging simulator. The closest I can come to describing it is "Fantasyworld Theme Park Tycoon." In a purposely generic fantasy kingdom, your employer, a shadowy figure known only as "The King," challenges you to prove that you are The One who will save them all. This is a fairly common plot so far. You're not some brave warrior or spell-slinging mage, though. You're an expert tactician, and you've been given a paltry sum of cash and told to go defend the border. Mission objectives usually revolve around "Kill X amount of Y," where Y is some disturbingly powerful monster. The goal thus becomes hiring on adventurers and keeping them happy, well-equipped, well-rested, healthy, fed... these guys need to be babysat an awful lot, for heroes.

There are three types of hero in this game, each one with certain needs. Rangers are the distance fighters, they need bow shops and woodland armories. Warriors are the big beefy grunt types, they want to have swords and heavy armor. Mages are your fireball-slinging little robe-wearers, and they require spell shops and robe outlets. You have no control at all over the heroes you hire, aside from being able to point them at "hunting areas" where they will go and stand around. Telling your heroes to go to a hunting area is kind of like telling them to go camp a spawn point in a MMORPG: they'll wander out there and hang around until monsters show up, and then leap into the fray, bashing and hacking and flipping spells around. Every monster they kill off nets you more money, which is funneled right back into building more buildings to keep the little bastards happy.

Each class of building has several different versions, each with upgrades available. As an example, you can take your food stands from a grimy little bug-infested stand that serves old fish and chips, to a good ale and meat hut, right up to a high-class award-winning steakhouse. That's the base upgrades, but you can also upgrade specific factors, adding in more seating or giving the place a cleanliness upgrade so pickier adventurers won't be put off by flies in their soup. My personal favorite building is the first-level entertainment stand, which offers a rousing game of One-Card Monte. I just wish that this wasn't indicative of one of the major problems with the game, the sheer stupidity of your hired heroes. We'll get to talking about that pretty soon. I'd like to keep talking about the feature set first.

Pretty much at a touch, you can get yourself a readout of all kinds of information. Pop-up windows will inform you of everything down to individual thoughts of your heroes (hooray for government-endorsed mind reading! Happy thoughts, Citizen!) and the amount of income you're taking in. These are fairly easy to understand, and it's a good thing: If you're interested in keeping your heroes around instead of having them storm off to work for an opposing kingdom or something, you'll have to keep an eye on their tiny little brains. If they're thinking "I'm hungry," you'd better have lunch on hand. Roughly every thirty seconds they'll develop an urge for new armor and better weapons, and likewise you should have those on tap. This can get really expensive if you have a mix of hero types out there leveling up and spawn-camping. Since they need new stuff after leveling up, and they can only level by killing monsters (or finding the occasional chest out there in the wilds), you'll usually have cash on hand to provide for them. Usually.

In a graphical sense this is a twisted little beast of a game. By all rights it's so simple graphically the engine shouldn't be anywhere near as jerky as it is. From research, this isn't just me either: once you zoom in past the omnipotent overview you start out in, the game slows down dramatically. That's generally not a good thing. You get used to pausing before you start working the camera around. The graphics themselves aren't anything special, but they do have a consistently unrealistic and goofy look. Everyone in this game has a constant smirk on their alarmingly oversized head. My personal favorite moment of the entire game was watching a group of Warriors swarm on and kill a small defenseless slime monster and then stand there smirking and head-bobbing in unison like an Army of Quagmire from Family Guy. This is the stuff nightmares are made of, kids. Buildings are impressive enough, with fires blazing in the Blacksmiths, weird glowing lights rotating about the mage areas, and an impressive spread of food at the lunch stations. The monsters somehow manage to look even more goony than the heroes. These are also the biggest maps I personally have ever seen in a real time strategy game. They're huge, sprawling things designed to keep you building Exploration Outposts and Healing Sanctuaries for your heroes to drop by instead of traipsing all the way back to town every ten minutes... because that will make them tired, and they'll make straight for bed instead of fighting.

The audio here is a good bit less impressive. There's a couple of chimes that go off to signify critical events, like a hero storming out of your village or the wrecking of one of your buildings. They sound pretty similar, though, so there's always a couple of minutes of looking around frantically until you find out what just went wrong. The music's fairly generic fantasy stuff, as are the clinky sounds of swords and the whoosh of spells. The voice acting earns a special note: There's not near enough of it, and if you're the sort who gets easily annoyed at repetitive sound clips you'll grow to hate the little quips from your heroes right quick. (The mages in particular must die. I don't care how, only that they do.)

I'm going to start to talk about the problems with this game as I see them now, and I'd like to point out that everything above this point is as straight an infodump as I can give. Anything after this point is raw opinion. If from the above this looks like a game you can get into, by all means have at it.

There's a couple of reasons I can't recommend this game to anyone except really die-hard gamers who perked up visibly at the thought of a medieval micromanagement game and have a lot of experience in this sort of genre.

The tutorial mode does not actually exist beyond a small handful of pop-up windows, and those tell you a barely-expanded version of what you get from the manual. There's no walkthrough of the first mission, there's no helpful explanation of the controls. You will keep the manual at your side and it will be your best friend. This game has a learning curve that takes off straight up, and it only gets harder from there. Medieval Conquest is not inclined to take it easy on you, and it moves along at a brisk and killing pace.

Most RTS-style games will let you pause for a few moments to issue commands and set things going, consult your stats and whatnot. This game doesn't. Pause genuinely means 'stop everything', the menu buttons become inaccessible and you're not allowed to issue even the extremely limited orders you can give with the game unpaused. Add this to the fact that your heroes will often get annoyed at the lack of an item and leave in just a minute or so and you have to be extremely fast on the draw to satisfy them.

At one point, while watching my force of ten bash monsters, I accidentally set the game to 9x speed, as fast as it would go. Before I could tap the speed back down again, more than half of them had decided that they were going to leave because I didn't stock swords of their level. I set the speed back down and went to the weapons store, and stocked that item. They walked right past it, bitching heavily about my lack of the sword no doubt -already hanging in the display window. That brings us to the "heroes are dumb" portion of our review, and they are. They'll storm off right past the group of monsters attacking a building to get a nap, they'll dash back and forth between two monsters without actually attacking either, they'll stand there and get themselves killed off for no obvious reason.

I am, in other words, not impressed. Medieval Conquest seems to want to be a cute, friendly, baseline RTS, and it hamstrings itself with the lack of any guidance or... well, plot hooks, anything at all to keep you playing other than the challenge of keeping big-headed Quagmire-clones rolling in swords and food. Getting down to scoring this thing is therefore really hard. I found Medieval Conquest completely unplayable, a confusing mess of a game that beat my sensibilities as a gamer to a pulp. It's entirely possible that someone else more in tune with the wavelength of this title will have a ball with it. Accordingly, I started with a base score of 5 and hacked a point off for general user-unfriendliness. Have a ball if this is your kind of thing, and you should be able to tell if it is. It's just not mine, is all.

Score: 4.0/10