The Guild 2
Review
The many bugs keep it from reaching its potential
by Sergio Brinkhuis
reviewed on PC
Diplomacy & law
Another change can be found in how diplomacy is handled. Even with patch 1.16, diplomacy is still somewhat buggy but I managed to work around the problems enough to actually feel I can say something sensible about this part of the game. In the previous game, it was possible to manipulate the council sessions in such a way that you were able to assign family members into offices. With three playable characters this has become easier to achieve and a lot more rewarding. With three votes in the council, becoming the Sovereign isn't all that hard and unless you are killed, no one will manage to kick you out. Unfortunately, the game doesn't make it very clear who gets to vote on what occasions, making the voting system confusing to use (the bugs in the system don't help here either).
The privileges that come with the different offices are also a little unclear. Where the office overview will tell you that a certain office has no privileges, in actuality you will be able to control all sorts of things. The privileges are fun and at times quite powerful. Has one of your characters been charged with a crime and summoned to court? Well, have one of your other characters order the accuser taken to prison and you are home free. Is your enemy sprouting businesses all over the place, leaving you no room for your own buildings? Well, bomb it a couple of times until its health-bar goes to red and have it torn down because it obviously is a 'safety hazard'.
Stupid, seriously stupid
Now, that last part might sound as if you are cheating right? It obviously wouldn't be if the AI characters would attempt to do the same to you, but they don't. The AI in The Guild II is seriously stupid. In the original game, your enemies already had the intelligence of a dung beetle and I could swear that the developers did a copy/paste job for The Guild II. A good example is the AI that handles the production in your businesses. While the screen from which you can set the AI settings looks promising, it does not seem to have much effect. You will be bombarded with -production has been interrupted- messages because the AI, despite having two or three horse carts, has not deemed it necessary to buy enough source materials. Selling items is apparently not important either as oftentimes huge piles of products sit around for ages until -you- throw them onto a cart to be sold at the market. Sometimes you have to pay 50.000 gold extra to buy a business that is for sale, only to find out that it has tons of expensive goods sitting around that just never got sold and were added to the net-worth of the building.
And yet... my opponents get rich enough to buy new businesses and buy expensive titles. I can only conclude that the AI factions cheat all over the place and do not have to work for their money in the same way that I do.
The AI also isn't smart enough for most of the special operations that you can do. I am yet to be taken hostage, have never been attacked despite having waged war on my opponents and have never seen any office-related action taken against me. One would have to assume that the AI simply doesn't know that these options exist as it seems to go no further than an occasional bombing.
Amatuer programmers or just rushed?
In many ways, The Guild II feels like a less ambitious version of its original. The graphics have been improved, the maps are a little bigger and the interface has received a major overhaul, but many things have actually been dumbed down by a degree.
Playing the game will make you feel that you are dealing with an unfinished product. Forget the polish, this is rusty old steel that hasn't even been chromed yet. As one user of the official site put it: "They did it again, and sold us an Alpha version!". That statement sums it up nicely. During the production of the game, corners have been cut everywhere. Even slowing down time is done in an amateurish way. It is not time that slows down, it is the entire engine that slows down. This causes the speed of all the menus to slow down as well which in turn makes giving orders very impractical. Very sloppy.
What bugs me the most about The Guild II is that you can just feel the enormous potential in the game. Given maybe six more months of development the game might have been a real gem. Leave it on the shelves for now, and buy the gold version of the original if you don't have it yet because at least that game is stable.
5.0
fun score
No Pros and Cons at this time
