Lords of the Realm II on a netbook

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Crappy screenshot? Sorry - I can't seem to take pictures in Windows mode without getting the colours all garbled.

I have often triumphed a truth about games – good graphics, great sound and a great storyline is nice to have, but these elements don’t make the game. There are games out there which you play once, and then never play it again, until, perhaps, nostalgia hits you, and then there are games out there which can be infinitely replayable. The key difference? A game’s concept.

There aren’t too many games out there that don’t follow the logic of safety. The biggest example out there is probably Call of Duty with its many iterations of pretty much the same thing.

But then there are games out there which also try something new. If we look at The Sims, which was a game that was predicted to fail, or if we look at Theme Hospital, we see how unique ideas can translate to a timeless game. People still play Theme Hospital – just look for mods that try to wrestle with Windows 7 compatibility issues.

And on that note, my friend recently introduced me to a game that is so addictive, I haven’t had time to… write on Netbookist. I’m sorry.

The game is called Lords of the Realm II. It’s a sixteen year old game that has such a good concept that I don’t even mind suffering 256 colours and 640×480. It’s a game that seems like a mix of Civilization and Age of Empires. Yes – your goal is to conquer and smite your enemies until you are the one and only left.

Every turn, you have to deal your domestic issues first, and then military issues next. A bit like Civilization.

You allocate your citizens into different industry – wheat farming, cow herding, stone and iron mining, forestry and blacksmithing. There’s a cycle to this – you feed your peasants so that they multiply and provide you with labour (and don’t overthrow you), once you have extra labour, you allocate them to resource hunting, and then putting these resources into building arms. You then raise an army with the weapons you have – all while taxing your peasants a nonsensical 5% tax that won’t put much into your coffers until your empire becomes massive.

With the army you raised, you then go out to conquer neighbouring counties. And this is where this game turns from being a turn-based strategy into a real-time strategy. Every time you fight an enemy army, you must strategize on how best you can make the full use of expensive-but-strong knights, or your archers, which are terrible at self-defense but can shoot enemies miles away. Or you can go trampling on their land, disrupting their economy and causing a displeased peasantry.

The game ramps up in intensity as you proceed from fighting just one opponent to have to deal with four of them. Things get tougher too – land starts out unarable or you might not have an iron mine in your county, causing you to need to buy it from roving caravans.

And because of this convergence of Civ-like elements and AOE-like elements, Lords of the Realm II tends to have the addictiveness of Civ, while giving you more control over battles by putting you into a real-time fight. You’ll see your time disappear as you have one more turn… and then another.

If you want to get this game, you have to search it up online – it’s considered abandonware, so I suppose you can find it really easily. I’d recommend you the place I got the game from, but I don’t want you to suffer 5kb/s speeds.

Like

Civ-like turn-based strategy

AOE-like real-time warfare

Extremely addictive, in a “one…more…turn…” sense

Dislike

Low-res graphics

Verdict

This game is so good, you probably could play it all day, all night. It’s simple but extremely fun!

Gameplay: Engrossing.

Graphics: It’s the 90′s!

Work needed to get game to play: Minimal, though getting a screenshot… oh god why…

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