Merchant Prince 2

Discount Price: $12.99

Accessories:

PC Gamer (1-year)

Customer Reviews:

flfundoc [Posted on 2001-08-13]
This is simply a re-release of the original. If you own and played the original, don't bother buying MPII; it's the same game. Is a great game, lots of ways to win and "work" the system--but was looking forward to some new twists on the original and was very disappointed. Should have been called Merchant Prince 1.01 (to be fair to the buyer). (Four stars to the original, minus one for getting me to buy it again.)

The worst game EVER [Posted on 2001-09-09]
This is the "Plan 9 from Outer Space" of computer games. It is so bad, you might want to buy it just to experience the misery. What makes this game so bad and ultimately unplayable is the user interface, which is a cryptic and bewildering collage of badly-rendered artwork. Once you have found the random icon that lets you actually trade goods, you are left with a number of important questions, such as "Am I buying now, or an I selling now?" "How much money do I have?" and "What is the object of this game, how do I win, and what should I be doing?" I tried to play this game three times and I never completed a single turn. This one should never have been released.

Painful walk down memory lane. [Posted on 2001-10-17]
Merchant Prince II is a painful twisted mutation that sends most old Machiavelli fans packing. The core of the game is good, because it's the old one. However, the new interface is awkward, the trade routes don't work as well anymore (Especially in Multiplayer), and crashing is always right around the corner.

Yet again, this is an excellent example of a product not tested enough before it hit the shelves. However, what makes this case of lackluster testing really offensive is that there was a base game built approximately 6 years ago. The game did not change that much, so how can you take a working old game, totally screw it up and then release it as a working product? Save your money, or better yet, build an old DOS system and find the old game, and play that.

Don't waste the money [Posted on 2001-12-23]
The premise for the game is as good as it is familiar. Take stuff from here and trade it there for more than you paid. You build up trade routes, buy influence at court, etc. Unfortunately, the game stinks. The trade route option doesn't work, you are forced to micro-manage at every step even the piddling ones that really should be automated.
If you are looking for a good trading sim, don't buy this one.

What a disappointment! [Posted on 2007-05-04]
Even more so, I think, than Master of Orion III. MoO III at least introduced new concepts and made some serious attempts to improve the gameplay.

This game has at its core the titles Merchant Prince and Machiavelli: the Prince. It makes few innovations on them, so the core game is good. But somehow it went wrong. The music is turned up WAY too loud, for a start. But after that it doesn't get better: the UI could have been improved over Machiavelli: the Prince, but instead it got much worse. In particular, the minimap shows much larger icons, with the result that it shows such a small area as to be almost unusable (the minimap is one of the most important screens in this series for manipulating your pieces and playing the game). The graphics were made more flashy, but they lost the crispness of those in Machiavelli.

I can't think of a reason to play this game when the others are still usable. My advice: get ahold of Machiavelli: the Prince (it's freely downloadable from the Internet) and run it in an emulator. It runs well in DOSBox.

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