The total war series has enjoyed considerable success so far and is now into its fourth incarnation, Medieval II: Total War. The new Kingdoms expansion pack was designed to eliminate a few niggles that people have had with the game, and to provide a radically new playing experience by changing the scale of the game. Much like Viking Invasion did for the original Medieval: Total War, Kingdoms brings the scale of the game down. You fight over smaller areas, with multiple armies, greater numbers of troops and more realistic scope to your empires.

What is most distinctive with this latest release is that in fact you are receiving not one expansion, but four - four separate campaigns with their own new unique factions, new units and entirely new maps. Each brings a different style of warfare and a different time period to face. The first three of these are effectively sub-divisions of the original game, each focusing on a particularly brutal historical conflict, namely the Crusades, the Teutonic campaign (the Holy Roman Empire's spread into Eastern Europe) and the Britannia campaign. The last brings a whole new area of the world into play, one that was barely covered by previous Total War titles: the Americas campaign. This campaign gives you the option of playing as either the Conquistadors with limited but extremely powerful units, or the more numerous but initially weak natives resisting the Spanish invasion.

Kingdoms promised a lot. There were claims of no more pointless rebel factions who never interact with you, other than to sit and wait to be conquered - although these embarrassing areas are still present. Born from an upper limit in how many individual factions that feasibly can be run and still keep the game playable, they remain in the campaigns. Fortunately however, when you own generals rebel there are now rebellion factions linked into historical events that your less loyal generals and legions switch to, which is a particularly major part of the Britannia campaign. There are new political systems to replace the pope and the AI of the computer factions are designed to react a little more to your actions.

Each of the four new campaigns has its own distinctive feel and required tactics. For example, in America playing as the Spanish, you have very little income and your ability to build units depends entirely on your ability to please the Spanish King, meaning that your progress is determined by the missions he sets, while you are also forced to rapidly strike city after city, burning and looting as you go. The only way for you to get money is from sacking the larger enemy cities; stay for too long in one area or become too defensive and you quickly run out of funds. The natives however have the opposite problem and have to build up alliances, create large armies and develop their cities as much as possible in order to resist the conquistadors. In the Crusades you have hero commanders with special abilities, special objective cities you must hold (like Jerusalem) and special units obtained when you hold these cities.

This all adds to the tactical and strategic variety of the original game. Personally, I find these campaigns much more challenging. The scale seems greater as well, with larger battles - especially in the Crusades campaign, where the norm is for three or four full armies to come face to face. To assist you with these battles, you now have some control over allied armies. You cannot control every constituent unit, but you can give general orders to the commander of the allied army - attack, defend or stand and shoot. Now these are rather limited tactically, but at least they stop the suicidal charges that the AI always used to make (in Rome: Total War I used to intentionally send my allies away before some battles so they did not get slaughtered). This small change removes one of my largest gripes with the battle system and adds substantially to the enjoyment of the large clashes that take place in Kingdoms.

On top of this, it seems that the AI has been tweaked. Diplomacy (particularly alliances) and the AI controlled nations' long term planning feel much more stable; the other nations actually seem to act intelligently and consistently. I can't help but feel however that this is not a direct improvement of the AI, but rather that the actions of other nations and their attitude to you is more hardwired to try and represent historical events, so as such you would expect less variation in the game during replays. The general game mechanics however remain unchanged and the improvements in Kingdoms don't apply to the original Medieval campaign, which is a shame and probably wouldn't have taken too much effort to incorporate.

Those of you who were irritated by some of the historical inaccuracies of previous Total War games will still have your gripes here. One example would be the Byzantine flamethrowers - sorry, Greek fire launchers - which border on the ridiculous, while the ease with which the heavy crusader knights can travel through the desert is nonsensical. In fact, the indefensible position of the crusader princes is a little too easy; the utter defeat you expect to be waiting around the corner does not come easily enough. Still, these are minor niggles and overall a fantastic balance has been achieved in producing a playable and enjoyable game.

The new units and regions have been given the same level of care and attention graphically as the original release. The units are wonderfully drawn with great variety and several different models of each, meaning that your armies never look too uniform. I particularly like the Scots and Native Americans. There is plenty here to show off even the higher end systems, but it runs well enough for those whose PCs are not the best.

One of my gripes with Medieval II was the loss of some of the strategic elements of the previous games, like Rome: Total War and its expansion Barbarian Invasion. These games pitted radically different armies together and enemies who had a rather different mix of approaches on the strategic map. Medieval II: Total War - Kingdoms brings in AI enhancements and more tactical and strategic nuances, like the subtle adjustment to make the impact of spears on cavalry and the power of a good cavalry charge more apparent. Before this I felt that Medieval II had reduced the impact of such events on the battlefield, consequently diminishing the impact of your tactics. The variety of the campaigns and the different sides involved is enough to keep you going for some time. While more of a completion of the ideal of Medieval II rather than a whole new game, Kingdoms is the best value expansion pack of any game I've played in recent times, with four new campaigns to battle through. As such, this really is an essential purchase for everyone who played and enjoyed the original, and yet more reason for those yet to experience it to get on the battlefield.

Reviewed by Gavin Udall for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).