Valradia Mod is a free mod from Kantez90s. This add-on was developed for the strategy game Medieval II: Total War: Kingdoms, focusing on the development of a new campaign. If you’re looking to follow a custom story of small, fictional kingdoms, this could fit the bill. In terms of factions, the mod only reskins existing ones from the vanilla version although strategic parameters were changed.

With its content, Valradia Mod is a good one-time mod you can check out. If you’re looking for longer campaigns, try the Wrath of the Norsemen or the Roar of Conquest mods.

Be the last kingdom standing

The main premise of the Valradia Mod campaign is a power struggle on a continent ravaged by religious turmoil and war between small kingdoms. You can choose one of these kingdoms and plan your way around the rest of the continent. At this point, players will find that no faction is severely overpowered compared to the others. Each has its strengths and weaknesses you can exploit toward victory.

In terms of content, however, the mod only reskins and applies custom textures to existing factions in the vanilla versions. For this mod, however, developers chose to focus on the medieval European ones–a design choice easily visible in their fictionalized counterparts. After a few games, the visual changes become less apparent, and experienced players might recognize the inspiration. Still, factions remain balanced in a different way than the vanilla.

The only limitation is that the mod doesn’t offer much. Sure, it has its own campaign, but it only consists of a few missions and nothing more. You could play the game a few more times to test out the other factions, but the mod gets old after that. The gameplay potential is limited due to the lack of new units or technologies you can leverage for new plays.

A one-off experience

Although it presents a good idea for rehashing existing factions and making them playable without being too similar to the base game, Valradia Mod remains largely limited in its offering. It can expand its campaign to have more missions or at least have a better story that can help give identity to the entire experience. You can play the campaign once or twice but it rapidly loses value after that.