The Guild 2 Critic Reviews

A fairly solid economic strategy simulation where the player can utilize a number of varying tactics and maneuvers to gain an advantage in a well-designed medieval environment. Unfortunately, the impressive level of detail and the interesting gameplay options at your disposal take a backseat to the technical issues and repetitive micromanagement.

The Guild 2 is an open-ended game that has a great concept and carries it almost to full fruition. Unfortunately, some frustrating bugs mar the package.

Alchemy, brigands, gold management, and lots of trading

There is something captivating about The Guild 2 that makes you put up with the bugs, the bad animations and the memory leaks.

Sadly the AI almost cripples the game and leaves questionable balances between class professions.

All of its bugs certainly put a damper on things, but the pace of the game also seems to be much slower, and the activities seem much more repetitive than they were before (the daily council meetings in particular are a real killer).

The game is a micromanager's dream, but if you don't like that type of gameplay, it may be your nightmare.

It looks fairly dated, and is only really for the devotee of life-sim games, feeling as it does like a semi-precious curiosity.

Micromanagement and repetition really bog down this original but unfulfilling game about directing the lives of people trying to make it in the Middle Ages.

While fans of the original and people who are intrigued by the ins-and-outs of rising in a social ladder will enjoy the game, there isn’t enough to grab newcomer’s attention, and everything does become quite overwhelming at times.

Think of it as the medieval version of being an air traffic controller: hard to recommend to everyone, but if you're up for a challenge, and can handle all that micromanagement, give it a shot. Just be prepared to go take a long lie down in a darkened room when you're done.

Although it may keep you interested for a while, and some of the classes offer some interesting challenges, The Guild 2 is even more rough around the edges than the original Europa, and not nearly as deep or even as interesting.

It doesn't help that The Guild 2 ships with technical issues: characters that disappear into walls, visual artifacts that take a restart to clear, buttons that don't work at all, and drop-sync issues with multiplayer games.

If The Guild 2 gets the patches it deserves, there’s a worthwhile simulation in here somewhere for niche-hybrid lovers. Else it’s just a glorious mess of ideas stumbling around in a soup of unrealized possibilities.

Ambitious and complex throughout, but lacking the fun factor.

Lifestyle simming is engaging for a little while, but its sluggish pacing and repetitive tasks do irreparable damage to the game's fun quotient.

A maddening example of a game that was ruined by a lack of focus in its design stages - had it been released with a wider scope it may have made a great RPG, or had it been a little faster paced and involving it may have made a mediocre RTS.

If it sounds a little like that other everyday-life game, "The Sims", that's because it is. But only a little. Both games are about your character's struggle to get ahead in the world, but The Guild 2 makes it a struggle for you as well.