Real Warfare 2: Northern Crusades

I went into this one specifically because the historical setting caught my eye: the Northern Crusades are one of those genuinely under-explored corners of medieval history, and a real-time strategy game built around the Teutonic Order's push into 13th-century Prussia sounded like a serious niche win. What I found was a game that sits in an awkward middle ground between a Total War imitator and a Mount & Blade lite - ambitious enough to respect, rough enough to frustrate. The core structure splits into two layers. On the campaign map, you roam northern Europe in real time as a Komtur of the Teutonic Order, recruiting troops, trading, taking quests, and steering your single army across a living world where raiders prowl roads and rival forces besiege settlements without waiting for you. That continuous real-time world is the game's most distinctive idea - enemies don't pause for you, and the map has genuine momentum. When the engine drops into tactical battle mode, you get large-scale field engagements with cavalry, archers, pikemen, heavy infantry, and siege weapons all operating under a rock-paper-scissors unit counter system, with up to 80 environmental and morale factors supposedly influencing each fight. Unit upgrades carry over between missions, and your hero commander levels up and allocates skill points that affect army size and effectiveness. The AI in battle earned praise from several reviewers at launch for using varied tactics, which still holds up as a modest differentiator against contemporaries. Here is where the numbers start working against it, though. Steam user reviews sit at a dead-split 50% positive across 105 reviews - that is a community verdict, not a rounding error. The campaign structure is significantly more linear than the roaming map implies: missions funnel you toward specific objectives, and free exploration yields poor XP and loot returns compared to sticking to the main thread. Hit a mission that outguns your current army and the only answer is grinding weaker enemies until you level up, a loop that wears thin fast. The upgrade system has documented logic failures where gold and experience requirements are met but the game still blocks the promotion. There is no fog of war on the strategic map, which removes any scouting decision-making and undercuts the "real warfare" premise the title leans on. On modern Windows, the StarForce DRM can require a manual driver update to function at all - worth knowing before you install. For strategy players who specifically want the Teutonic Order setting and can tolerate a 2011-budget RTS with some mechanical inconsistencies, there are genuine rewards here. The unit attribute depth is real - individual soldiers carry a staggering number of stats affecting performance and behavior. The tactical battles, when they click, deliver the kind of hard-won satisfaction that a niche historical RTS should. Multiplayer supports up to six players on dedicated servers, which is a bonus that few games in this price tier offered at launch. The mod toolkit was also intended to allow full strategic map and model replacement, though the modding scene never grew to meaningful size. The honest comparison is this: if you have played Mount & Blade and wished it had a proper tactical battle layer with thousands of soldiers instead of a third-person brawl, Northern Crusades scratches part of that itch. If you come in expecting the strategic depth of a Paradox title or the campaign polish of a modern Total War, you will hit the ceiling inside a few hours. Approach it as a budget curiosity with a strong battle core and a wobbly everything-else, and your session count may surprise you. Diego, Scout Team

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