The Guild 2 is a very good mixture of life management,economic simulation,real-time strategy,few RPG elements. Our goal is to take a person and climb the economic and social ladder of German society, turning our one original character into a dynasty by marrying, and having children and grandchildren. We start off by customizing our characters appearance, such as hair style, clothing, and Zodiac sign. In addition, we choose one of four character classes that determine what type of businesses we can build and what kind of abilities our character can gain.
Alot of things can be done at the begining of the game.We can buy other businesses, run for office, use your charms to woo the members of the opposite sex in an attempt to marry them and add to your family. We can attempt to bribe the town officials in order to get a position. Instead of bribery, we might also choose to threaten them.
We can also run one or more businesses in an attempt to make some income. We can choose to be a blacksmith, an alchemist, or a farmer, etc. We can run our business honestly, but if we prefer things a bit quicker, we can choose to extort other businesses for protection money. We can hire thieves to steal from competitors. With enough money, we can upgrade our business, allowing greater storage or more employees.
In each map, there is more than one town. We can attack people traveling from town to town to steal their money or their goods. But becarefull we coul be sent to jail because of our crimes.
As we run our business or marry into another family, we will also make more enemies.Other families in the game will declare a feud, and will attempt to rob our businesses or even burn them to the ground. In addition, they may attack our character on sight, or try and get him or her removed from office. They might even accuse our character of crimes they didn't commit in an attempt to ruin your reputation.
As we progress in the game, our character will gain levels, just like in RPG games. Our character has hit points and stats in areas like Charisma and Stealth that can be upgraded when gaining a level. In addition, every couple of levels gives us the opportunity to learn new abilities which further enhance our character.
All of these things occur in real-time, and with so much to do and so many things going on, it is very easy for first time players to get lost and confused as to what they are supposed to do next. Luckily, the game comes with a detailed Tutorial that will help walk us through things such as buying and maintaining businesses, and managing relationships with other characters. If we find ourself with too much to do and not enough time to do it, we can slow down time in order to plan our next move, or set some of our businesses to AI-controlled so that we have one less thing to worry about. It will be interesting to see if the developers can find a balance between having too much time to do everything and having too little time to do anything.
