Lords of the Realm
This is a gem from 1994. I point that out because games back then cared less about teaching you how to play in game and instead wanted you to figure things out by reading the manual. Watch a how to play video on youtube or something.
Starting this game can seem difficult with not fully understanding what to do. But once you figure it out and start your campaign the game is so rewarding. There is a large mix of gameplay that you can dive into. Given that a large portion of the game is focused on seige warfare and resource management it can sometimes feel like a slow grind but overall it’s a great game.
– Real player with 35.0 hrs in game
რამდენადაც ვიცი ეს Total War-ობდა სანამ Total War ი-Total War-ებდა (სამჯერ ჩქარა თქვი XD). ყოველშემთხვევაში, ყველა 90-ანელს აქვს თამაში რომელიც ნოსტალგიას იწვევს. ეს ის თამაში არაა, it’s a tribute. უფრო სწორად პირველი ნაწილი იმ თმაშის. ბავშვობაში არ ვიცოდი რა ერქვა და მე და ჩემი ძმა “ოჩესფუ”-ს ვეძახდით, ბრძოლისას არსებული უნიტების “Archers Pull (ან Full)” -ის გამოთქმების ბავშვური ინტერპრეტაცია. ბევრი ვეძებე ადრე მარა სახელის გარეშე გამიჭირდა პოვნა და ოი როგორ გამიხარდა სთიმზე რომ აღმოვაჩინე სრულიად შემთხვევით. XD ვიტყოდი რომ ერთ-ერთი რთული თამაშია რაც კი ოდისმე მითამაშია, უფრო სწორად რომ ვთქვათ სწავლაა ძნელი და გრძელი. მოკლედ შემდეგი მსხვერპლისაკენ.
– Real player with 29.1 hrs in game
Darklands
An RPG from Microprose that, to my knowledge, was the only RPG Micropose ever released. And you know what? It may not have aged well, as in at all, but oh, how it puts some games to shame! Basically, one of the earliest examples, if not the earliest example, of an open-ended Role-Playing Game, you have everything you could want just about in this one package!
Character creation: Whoo, boy! This game has a very complex, but very fun and interesting, character creation system. While you only have so much to choose from for your character’s sprite, the real fun comes from choosing which skills you want each party member to have. For example, want to have a well-balanced party like the game manual suggests? Go right ahead. Want a party full of big strong warriors who are dumb as a bucket of rocks but can wear all armor and wield heavy weapons without breaking a sweat? You can do that. Maybe you want to have just one character to be an alchemist and have the rest be what would be considered in many modern RPGs as a “paladin,” nothing is going to stop you. Now, having said that, there is no “traditional class” system, it all depends on your characters attributes and skills, and you can alter them (within reason) to your liking. There is no “true” right-or-wrong party here.
– Real player with 247.7 hrs in game
Read More: Best Classic Sandbox Games.
A masterpiece by MicroProse
This game is right up there, in quality and complexity, with MicroProse’s other legendary titles, such as X-COM: UFO Defense and Master of Magic/Orion. Darklands is the result of such geniuses trying their hand at an RPG.
Features:
A massive open world, in medieval Germany, with historically accurate towns, names, geography, economy, and so on. Everything is simulated in an extremely complex way, the world is very alive. The game was so complex, it actually required 5000 hours of testing, and even after that several patches were needed. The version on Steam is the latest and best one, of course.
– Real player with 41.9 hrs in game
Age of Empires II (2013)
gameplay is excellent, community is psychedelic.
– Real player with 2675.1 hrs in game
Read More: Best Classic Multiplayer Games.
very good i play this with my father every week.
– Real player with 909.9 hrs in game
Lords of the Realm II
As someone who started playing strategy games years after this game came out, I’d never heard of the Lords of the Realm series until a couple months ago. After watching a video showing this game’s gameplay and seeing that it was basically a more primitive Total War game with some unique twists, I went “What the heck” and bought it.
I was not disappointed.
Gameplay has you managing your kingdom and armies on the turn-based map. You keep your people fed (grain cattle), assign your peasants to gather resources (iron, wood, and stone), forge weapons, build and upgrade castles, and raise and move armies. You have to check on your provinces each season to make sure your peasants are all working and you’re not going to starve, but this is easily done with the Idle Peasant button on the minimap.
– Real player with 92.7 hrs in game
I will preface this Review by saying that I had very little idea what I was getting into when I bought this game. I remebered hearing about it, and heard that it was a hidden gem of retro games or somthing. I was looking for somthing Fairly inexpensive and Slightly entertaining, I decided, hey I know that this game is on steam, it looks mildly fun, I saw the low price tag of less than five dollars and thought, well it’s really cheap, I might as well buy the whole set of the lords series while I’m at it, and so, having spent 13 dollars on some games from the early to late 90s, decided to play them. quickly, I discovered that they didn’t work due to my computer being so new, and so I spent about an hour getting them to work. that was an hour of boring work while spent though, because one of those games was Lords of the Realm II.
– Real player with 55.6 hrs in game
Tzar: The Burden of the Crown
This game is such an underrated old school rts! I’m so happy to see it’s on steam; for years this game existed in the shadows with little to no publicity. In the early 2000s my cousin had this game on a disk that was badly damaged and unreadable. My father and I took it to many different game stores to find a new copy. We never found one, as Tzar was already discontinued in the US, but we did manage to repair the disk so that (sometimes) it was readable! Of course I backed it up on many different machines and thumb drives. Up until today I was playing the game in a Windows 7 VM. Over 15 years after finding it on my cousin’s computer, I still enjoy sinking hours into it. What a dream come true to see it on Steam!
– Real player with 76.8 hrs in game
Ah, what a blast of nostalgia! As if I touched some magic crystal, which sent me back in time to the distant past. I didn’t even notice how few dozens of hours were already far behind. And I still don’t want to come back from my journey…
Legendary classic. Can’t even imagine how many hours I spent playing it back in the days. It is clear that Tzar was heavily inspired by AoE serie. And it even had a lot of it’s unique features, like weather effects, change of day and night, units could gain experience (and potentially become killing machines).
– Real player with 69.5 hrs in game
Knights of Honor
Knights of Honor is a classic grand strategy game, quite different from any other in the genre. Everything happens in real time, including the battles that can be fought manually and the campaign map really feels alive as a lot of things are happening at the same time.
There are a few things to manage, like your town construction, your royal court, armies and diplomacy. These things are fairly simplistic (compared to the modern games) and are easy to learn, but very fun to play with once you understand them. While the manual battles can be fun and dynamic, they aren’t the strong part of Knights of Honor. The actions on the campaign map are definitely where the main entertainment comes from.
– Real player with 124.6 hrs in game
Before I start, I want to mention one thing: this negative review is not about the game itself. Knights of Honor is a great RTS game, and you should definetly play it. My problem stems from the fact that this game is a prime example of a developer being lazy and just dumping the original game, unpatched and unoptimized to Steam for a price that seems very steep, considering the performance quality of this game. To first start off, this game’s major fault is the fact that it cannot boot into its default resolution properly. No matter what you do, it will only show 3/4s of the image (in some cases, the game will also force your monitor resolution to 640x480) that can only be fixed via the HD patch. The main issue with the HD patch is that for some people, it will not work. I have had friends who purchased this game and were unable to get the patch running, leaving them with a game that was a waste of money and time. The game also still has a major issue that I’ve experienced even on an old XP machine as a kid with an original (now lost) disc copy; Random crashes. These seemingly have no real trigger, they will happen often after 1-2 hours of play, and while not annoying due to the ability to set frequent autosaving, preventing loss of progress, its insulting that this issue still persists years later, with the developers never addressing it or releasing a patch. Overall, I don’t recommend the game due to the aforementioned HD patch issue some people I know have had, otherwise if you’re lucky enough to get it working, it is possibly one of the most addicting strategies out there.
– Real player with 115.8 hrs in game
Medieval: Total War™ - Collection
If I were stranded on a desert island, but inexplicably provided with a gaming PC and allowed only a single game, this would certainly be it. A lot of titles have come and gone over my life, but there is something magical about this game that maintains a hold over me, even now.
Fans familiar with the franchise will recognise the game’s format. At its heart, it’s a turn based strategy game, composed of two arenas.
In the first, you pore over the campaign map to manage your provinces, generals and armies on the macroscopic level. You control your economy by tweaking taxes, maintaining a trade network and constructing improvements to your provinces. You recruit troops and agents to fight for supremacy through martial power or subterfuge. You plot, scheme and strategise to guide your faction to victory.
– Real player with 663.8 hrs in game
The Total War franchise has become massive and the games now are nearly unrecognisable from Shogun 1 and Medieval 1. The format changed from this first pair, but perhaps lost a little bit of the magic that only exists in Medieval Total War (MTW) 1.
Graphics-wise, the campaign map doesn’t really look too bad; it’s only in the battles that the age of the game is more apparent, as square seagulls fly over your soldiers.
In terms of game-play, it’s solid, It probably feels pretty slow compared to everything from Rome 1, as units get fatigued and enter slow-motion. Battles can lose that dynamic feel as you chase a unit of horse archers around with your infantry and knackered cavalry… But the campaign map, building tiers, etc, is all super-addictive and always keeps me coming back for more.
– Real player with 316.6 hrs in game
Knights and Merchants
Great Nostalgia, as I played the original game ~2000 when I was a kid. If you already played this game, you can’t do much wrong buying it again, it contains both campaigns (The Shattered Kingdom [TSK] & The Peasants Rebellion [TPR]) which should take ~50hrs of raw speedrunning if you still know the concept of the game.
There is a problem though: This is NOT the original game from 2000! It’s a remake with a hell of new bugs and changes (esp. if you played TSK and didn’t own the Gold Edition)
Some things I noticed:
– Real player with 148.3 hrs in game
If The Settlers and Dark Souls had a love child, it would be Knights and Merchants.
I never got to play this when it was originally released in 1998, and I regret it, but the mistake has now been rectified!
K&M is an old school RTS/city economy builder hybrid. The concept is simple, the graphics a little dated, but still good enough, the sounds are simple and your minions make cute little comments when ordered to do something. The UI is easy to understand and on the surface, it seems a simple game.
– Real player with 140.4 hrs in game
Stronghold Crusader 2
Stop, dont go any further. If you were considering this game wether it is worth a purchase. Ill tell you right now, it is definitely not.
Its a piece of trash garbage game that was forcefully defacated unto the faces of its true loyal supporters and fan base, the people who brought you the orignal Stronghold that was beloved and missed were long gone during the unholy birthing of this atrocity.
I have played and deconstructed every stronghold and dozens of rts games back in the day and know what it was about each game that people adored and what it was that people despised.
– Real player with 185.6 hrs in game
The StrongHold series has always been one of my favourite ones, and this game at the end of 2018 like every other game of this series still is one of the best from FireFly Studios.
The core of the game stays the same - build castles, gather resources, control peasants as a king, keep their happiness and work going, train your troops, harvest taxes and money, and of course build tons of structures - there are really dozens of them, from the farms to churches, fortifications and army building; of course, given the desert/crusader setting of this game, you’ll have lots of weapons and armies too - both offensive and defensive.
– Real player with 142.4 hrs in game
Tilesweeper
Tilesweeper
…is a logic puzzle game. Remove all the tiles from the level, one by one, flagging and avoiding those armed with a bomb.
⚙ Game Description & Mechanics ⚙
As any clone of Minesweeper, you’re presented with a tile board, here represented by a dungeon, balcony or other location. The objective of the game is to either correctly flag every tile armed with a mine, or clear out all the tiles that aren’t - either will result in a success, just as long as no mine is detonated.
– Real player with 56.9 hrs in game
It is hard to be too critical of this as it does what it does well enough. It is a nicer looking version of Minesweeper. I could stop there but I have to point out this is one of those games that 10 hours playing it (which is what it took to get to the easy 39/60 achievements) feels like 100 in a more compulsive game. Most of the remaining achievements are for “grinds” - the worst is to break 1 million tiles. In 10 hours I have broken 25k. Sheesh.
Still, we all loved Minesweeper. This is just….more. And more.
– Real player with 42.6 hrs in game