The Guild II puts players in the Middle Ages where they must build a family, a career, and more importantly, a name for themselves. As the game progresses, you will need to improve your social standings with the most powerful members of the town, raise a healthy and well-educated family, and maintain a steady profit through your profession. Players can customise their character with quite a few options: changing their appearance, voice and their class. There are four classes to choose from, including patron, rogue, craftsman or scholar. Each of the classes offers a completely different flavour to the game. For instance, playing as a rogue you’ll be able to rob the riches from people and have income made from hiring workers that do your dirty work for you. You can have them hiding in alleyways ready to prey on innocent townspeople, or have them stealing from people’s houses or workplaces. Meanwhile, as a patron you’ll be harvesting resources and eventually selling your goods for income. As your character levels up, through accomplishing certain tasks, there’ll be more and more abilities, attributes and buildings that you can construct.
As the game progress, and the urgency to secure your riches rises, you can choose to customise your buildings a bit too. You can add locks, barred windows or upgrade the entire building into something much larger with different benefits. It's often important to constantly upgrade your buildings the further you get into the game, as you'll be needing more income and people are more likely to try and steal from you.
Ye Olde beard of pimpness.
In The Guild II you begin with virtually nothing besides some cash, your house and your ambitions to become the greatest figure in the town. The Guild II is a very out-there sort of game, that doesn’t particularly fit into one genre. There are elements of lifestyle simulation, RPG and even a bit of town building added in for good measure. You will need to begin your raise in the social ladder by forming relationships with females, your friends and even your rivals. Later on, the RPG side of things comes into play as your character can learn new abilities at different levels, all of which help to improve your social standing and lifestyle.
In a town that has so many watchful eyes and suspicious characters you have to be careful in what you do. You can’t have your character openly attack someone in a crowded alley or you could face the court and end up in jail, or worse, death. Many of the other townspeople will be continuously out to get you, trying to prove to the court that you are an outlaw that only gains social status through murder or through bribes. They will attempt to rob from you, declare to the court that you should be removed from the town and even some can be nasty enough to try and burn down your buildings. So, you have to make sure that you are never caught in the act of doing something that could affect your social standing. For instance, we hired a rogue to steal some riches from a hut in broad daylight, but was caught in the act. Later, we were called to the court where another townsperson claimed that we were behind the act. From there you must fight for your innocence, whether flirting with the judge or paying someone out to prove your innocence to achieve it. In contrast, you can also catch others in the act and blackmail them for your benefit - to remove a competitor from their position or having them sent to jail.
The game relies quite importantly on forming relationships, which can be done by doing certain tasks, giving presents to people, or being there at the right time in providing assistance to someone as their house burns down. As the game progresses you’ll form friends that’ll help you to achieve your social rising, but also have enemies that will continuous try to bring you down. Unfortunately, the list of actions that can be done to form relationships are a tad limited, and are quite poorly executed. You can compliment people, embrace them or kiss them. After a while these become very repetitive, and puts you in a continuous loop of doing the same thing to form relationships with people. One of the things that stood out most for us was that a lot of features just seem very poorly executed too. You can walk up to a complete stranger and kiss them and they’ll love it, and when asking to bathe with someone the characters will stand behind a curtain rather than actually bathe with one another. This is the game's problem, there just isn't that much excitement in the forming of relationships, making the process of forming them just very, very dull.
Mourning the death of the less fortunate.
This is only one of the many problems within the game, where eventually everything ends up being a complete mess. The gameplay isn’t at all inviting to new gamers to the genre, with a lot of confusion being present with the amount of tasks that need to be accomplished and the constant switching between other characters (workers, family members) as the game gets further in. It’s not much of an incentive either that the game takes a very long time before it draws gamers into the more exciting aspects of it. There will be times early on where you’re trying to woo a certain special lady and then be thrown into jail for no apparent reason, left wondering what the hell is going on. Despite there being a fairly in-depth tutorial, there are still plenty of unnecessary surprises meet along the way.
Visually, The Guild II isn’t at all that appealing, despite having a new 3D engine. Animation is dreadful, some of the model work is pretty unattractive and there doesn’t seem to be much detail at all. In the game’s main town view, the further you zoom out the blurrier the game appears. Buildings will lose all sorts of detail and surrounding mountains and grass will just look like a complete mess. The game constantly stutters, people walk or even stand on top of other characters during cut-scenes, and quite humorously, depending on your character’s position, your character can hug absolutely no one or instead of kissing a female on her lips, you can kiss her breasts - unintended we're sure. It’s silly mistakes such as these that just make the game feel completely unfinished and just adds to the frustration of trying to enjoy the game’s merits.
The Guild II is a very hard game to review. While it certainly has it’s merits and a lot of depth, there’s just too much for new gamers to take in and enjoy. There are a lot of frustrating gameplay elements that ruin the experience and there are plenty of limitations that hold the game back. 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.
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