Real Warfare 2: Northern Crusades is the sequel to Real Warfare 1242.

Savages

Real Warfare 2 is an RTS with Total War like battles, but a Mount and Blade style map screen. You play as a knight of the Teutonic Order, who was exiled from the holy lands for sinning; you have been seen to North Eastern Europe to eliminate the Pagans from Prussia and to conquer the lands for your own - a premise I don’t particularly like.

The game didn’t seem to be particularly optimised - myself only managing 20 fps on the map screen, and 30 on the battle screen - but the game itself was well presented, with some nice effects, and decent textures and character models; although the UI seemed a tad cluttered, but I imagine if you were serious about the game you’d be using keyboard shortcuts anyway.

The reason I compare this to Mount and Blade is because you can roam around the map screen, trading, recruiting mercenaries, and visiting towns in a similar fashion; you even get your own castle, although this is right at the beginning of the game. As you progress through the story campaign, you collect more and more land - of which you can claim taxes on - whilst defeating the ‘dirty pagans of the north’ - no-one’s words.

The game starts you out with 120 inexperienced foot soldiers, and your own 20 man cavalry guard, and your first battle is against a band of robbers with a similar amount of units as yourself. This battle I won easily, I let the enemy attack my foot soldiers, and then I charged with my cavalry and decimated them. After this, I was tasked with defeating another group of robbers, but as I had no money, and no way to make money I had to take on an army three times the size of mine, and whilst I gave ‘em as good as they gave me, it left me with all my units dead, and them at half size, so that was it, the end of my campaign in the North.