I will not belabor the point: The Guild is my favorite game. In this review I’ll try to explain why this is, and where I’m coming from in terms of my interest in the game, and probably games generally speaking. Hopefully this will help introduce like-minded gamers to The Guild and perhaps also steer some people, if they have different tastes, from the game.

I have always enjoyed simulation games, particularly economic and life sims. I grew up playing what now seem like fairly simplistic sims (e.g., Theme Park, The Settlers, and The Sims) and was fascinated by the seemingly living world of the AI inhabitants in these games. As I began to enjoy role playing games more, and in particularly Ultima Online, I longed for a simulation game in which I wasn’t in complete control, but instead could actually be one of those small inhabitants in the simulated world. Nothing like this existed until I played the first Guild game (Europa 1400) and I was immediately won over, realizing that it was as close to a perfect game as I would ever find, short of developing one myself.

The Guild is indeed a simulated world. It doesn’t attempt to be huge like Skyrim. You are controlling a small family in a single town or on some maps a single town out of up to four. There are up to eleven other “dynasties” (i.e. families) living in these towns, and they all go about their business without your intervention. You are not god in this game – you are just a family existing and striving in the middle ages, and it is amazing fun. It seems there is not one area that The Guild has left out of its gameplay. You can get involved in politics, your character has a religiosity meter, favor (or disfavor) with every single sim in the game, a disposition based on their criminality or lack thereof, skills, perks (think fallout), marriage, children, trials, duals, and the list goes on.

The world in The Guild feels more alive than any game I have played. NPCs go about their business with a real purpose, and it is all simulated. They will do everything from sit around town and chat, go to the pub, hire a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, to run for office and command the city guard (who, by the way, are also governed by some degree of AI logic). In short, the game feels a lot like living in a real, functioning medieval town.

This all sounds extremely ambitious, and it is. Unfortunately, these ambitions come with a price: bugs (and lots of them!). The Guild has been officially patched twice (only once here on steam) and even with these patches there are numerous bugs. The more you play, the more you notice them and the more they suspend the reality of controlling a family in this simulated world. You can probably get about 100 hours of gameplay out of The Guild before these bugs really start to ruin the experience (I have played 100s of hours of the non-steam version).

The good news is that The Guild still has a small but surprisingly active community (go to the runeforge forums for this). McCoy! and a few other modders have made huge progress fixing bugs in the game and even adding some very cool features (e.g., the ability to become the pope and accuse people of heresy) and they continue to work on the game. My recommendation is to go to the runeforge forums and download the 4.17b patch and McCoy!’s legacy mod, then you’ll be ready to go for hundreds of hours of relatively bug-free simulation bliss.

In summary, if you’ve always enjoyed god games, economic sims, and life sims, but wanted to be part of the world rather than the controller of the world – wanted to have to work within the confines of human ability to influence the world (e.g., become mayor and change the law instead of using a hand in the sky to smite someone) then this is the game for you. If you want complete control over the world and all of its inhabitants then you might not enjoy this as much, but I still say it’s worth a try. Finally, if you’re a gifted or even aspiring coder (the game uses lua for everything) head over to the runeforge forums and join the modding community. I have no coding experience but they have been extremely kind and patient with me and I even managed to churn out a few helpful fixes/mods for the game.

This game is filled with so much, the game developers were incredibly ambitious & did a great job in my opinion.
It's a strategy/rpg hybrid, with insane depth, time can easily fly by playing this.

Unfortunately the game is buggy & requires patching along with mods to be 100% playable.

This is the one you want, not the original.

This stand-alone expansion originated as a fan-made overhaul mod for the original game. What results is the same game you get with The Guild 2, only polished much further and with many new additions. If you visit the Rune Forge forums, you'll see that they are still releasing patches (as mods, silly enough) even though the publisher has ended dev support. The community is also still active, with new posts on the forums each day.

I'm not trying to say that this game is the best thing ever, but it is definitely the only of it's kind. If you appreciate economics, history, sociology, politics, and the like, and you're looking for a somewhat casual strategy game, you should consider this game among the others on your list. If you're thinking of this as a medieval sims-type game or that you will be able to jump right in and start playing, you're going to be disappointed. This is a thinking man's game, and gamers who aren't willing to put up with bugs and take the required hours needed to fully understand the game will be wasting their money. I'm not saying only serious master-race strategy gamers can appreciate this game, or that people who don't like complicated games have bad taste or are dumb; I just think that the way the game is marketed makes it appear to be much more simple than it really is, and that results in a lot of bad reviews that shouldn't have been reviews to begin with.

It's a pretty enjoyable experience though i tend to play exclusively in dynasty mode. The only thing that can be a bit frustrating is the black death which because the churches are always low on medicine makes it a high likelyhood of death for your character should you contract it. you can micro manage if you prefer or you can set up trade routes and assign escorts to high value deliveries or even set certain buildings to be managed by the AI. The graphics while mediocre don't really detract from the game too much.

Interesing mix of an economic, political, business, and social simulation with rpg elements. Something like the love child of the Sims and Anno 1602. The depth of each facet is at the perfect spot to feel in control of each one but also be able to balance all of them together as well. The steam version updates to a pretty glitchy version, but a patch is available on the web to fix the most annoying bugs but still buggy enough to be frustrating (for instance the Banking line of buildings are still completely broken). All in all 7/10, probably not for you if you dislike simulation games, but it does have a more gradual learning curve than other games in the simulation genre for those with a passing interest in simulations that aren't too far in-depth.