The Guild 2 Renaissance

= One of my favorite games (with caveats). Just talking about TG2:R makes me feel like a child overexcited to show you all the things his new toy can do. You start off as peasant with a lump sum of cash, able to start your building your first business. You can sell your goods directly or at the market. The market has a wide price range depending on how much of an item is in stock. This can lead to interesting decisions such as controlling the only mine in town and producing goods besides iron so your rivals blacksmith building goes out of business and then you can purchase it adding to your monopoly. If economics don't excite you, there is an interesting politics system which often entails applying for office, upsetting the other dynasties vying for that seat, make bribes and using flattery just until the election is over. With a small stipend each month and power to abu- err use. You can be down right dastardly in TG2:R. Waylaying passing carts, kidnap people and hold them ransom, run a "mafia" protection racket, use your tavern wenches to distract the guards while you murder the guy that is on his way to the courthouse to testify against your murder last week. Even this just scratches the surface about what you can do in this game. While this game has quite a few bugs, I want to state that the singleplayer I rarely had any issue with (some maps are buggy, but the rest of the game ran fine).

I have played quite a few sim/rpg titles and pretty much none of them could compare to the complexity, depth and replayability of The Guild 2 Renaissance! :-D Totally no magic (well, not counting the love potions ^^), impressive level of historical and cultural details, and finally the number of different ways the game can be played - all of this will make you spend countless hours developing your perfect, Renaissance dynasty! A must-have for every rpg player out there! :-)

Sadly, what could have been a good game (thus why I gave it more than one star) is ruined by game breaking bugs and poor execution. Even with fan-made updates, your characters will get stuck in walls, randomly die for no reason, have their stats change on their own and your experience points (which you spend on attributes) will even be spent of its own accord. To top this off, the process for hiring employees is random. You can reject the random selection, but you can't just get a list of the class of employees you like to hire or request to specifically hire a certain class (even though all buildings are class specific). Your employees will stop working for no reason, the AI for running businesses is bad and causes long lengths of time where your business won't run and micromanaging more than a handful of businesses is impossible. GOG should have a warning that the game is very buggy before you download, that's how bad it is. I got fed up with the game breaking bugs within days and am getting a refund.

Unfortunately this game is so buggy its not worth having. It could have been one of the greatest rpg/tycoon/dynasty building games of the decade but the too much bugs spoiled all. Unbelievable that they still havent got the time or will to fix those. Avoid if possible.