Genghis Khan II

"If you ever get to play Genghis Khan IV you will never want to play this game again"

Storyline-6/10
Genghis Khan IV had more rulers to offer you and you can choose to be anyone. There are also more officers to choose from. Your officers do not betray you for no reason in Genghis Khan IV. This one does it as long as he is not your son in law. I find this idea lame and going against the storyline.

Soundtrack-5/10
No the soundtrack is terrible. Genghis Khan IV has a btter soundtrack. As for soundeffects this one can not be worth hearing either.

Graphics-7/10
The graphics are okay for a genesis game. I mean the game is quite dated but it is still acceptable.

Gameplay-5/10
1) The lack of characters to choose from made this game's replay value to be poor. There are more rulers to choose from in the three kingdom or bandit king games.

2) The lack of guys to recruit also hurt this game. I mean sure there are many jobbers to be found and jobbers to be your sons in this game. But after playing Genghis Khan IV I realised that this game actually left out many historical generals and officers that can join your forces.
This aspect made the game's human resource management to be boring.

3)To beat this game you need to save and reload often. This is not because you made a wrong decision or you lose battles while attacking. The problem is your officers that you choose to be your governor is not your son in law. Thus there is a high chance that he will become his own ruler. How unrealistic is this? I did not know know that I should save and reload and thus very often could not complete this game because my officers kept forming their own empires. My friend says I will try to have many son in laws by marrying my daughters to them. Nice try I say because creating daughters take time , time which could have been spent in battles or other stuff. Finally another friend of mine told me how he unified the world. I save at every turn and reload whenever I am unlucky which is often. Yes when the guy starts a rebellion and become his own master I simply reload. The bottom line is that this process makes this game boring since trying to remember to save at every turn is troublesome. Also if the enemy is really smart I can accept it but to save because of some unreasonable rule is just too much.

Conclusion - This game is really badly made. I had a hard time unifying the world but not because the AI is terrible
but because the rules that are set are lame. Fortunately they finally made much improvements in Genghis Khan IV. I would recommend that you get this game if you can find it. I played the chinese version on the PC and that one completely right all the mistakes in this one.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 06/15/03, Updated 06/15/03