Do you like cars? If so, Forza Motorsport 3 is the game for you. In fact, provided you don't hate cars, Forza Motorsport 3 is the game for you. Turn 10 Studios' latest racer is an ambitious game that tries to be a lot of different things for a lot of different people, and the great news is that it succeeds at just about every turn. It doesn't matter how good you are behind the wheel; you can find a difficulty level and a handling model to suit you. And while there are plenty of options available for those of you who enjoy painting or tuning your rides as much as you enjoy driving them, you don't have to devote any time to those features to reap their rewards. Forza Motorsport 3 is a bigger and better game than its predecessor in every way imaginable, and while it's not flawless, it's certainly way ahead of the competition.
Your first race in Forza 3 is spent at the wheel of an Audi R8 loaner, and by default, there are several driving assists--including the series' familiar dynamic racing line--turned on that serve as your water wings as you're thrown in at the deep end. From there, you're free to take your career in whichever direction you choose, though with limited funds at your disposal your first car is more likely to be a Scion than a Shelby. Career mode is divided into seasons, and each season you compete in a world championship that spans several races. You don't get to choose which championships you're entered into, so you start with relatively slow showroom cars early on and must get some miles under your belt before competing in thoroughbred racecars later on. With that said, championship races are generally two or three weeks apart, and so after every race you're invited to choose another, shorter series of events to take part in. You can also ignore the calendar completely if you choose, and just compete in whichever events you want to at anytime. Either way, the options you're presented with are determined, at least in part, by the cars that you own, so if you manage to get your hands on an Enzo Ferrari or a Porsche Carrera GT early on, you don't have to wait around before putting them to work. You might even find that you can use one or two of your cars in events for which they far exceed the maximum performance restrictions, though this bug doesn't rear its competition-trivializing head very often.
Regardless of what you're driving, you're free to pick and choose which assists you want to use, and you have an opportunity to quickly alter your settings before every race. This is definitely a welcome feature, because while you might not feel the need for antilock brakes or stability control when you're driving something modest, you might not be nearly as confident climbing into a Bugatti Veyron supercar for the first time. It's tempting to make things easier by keeping all of the assists turned on, but there's a great incentive to turn them off, because every time you do so, your potential earnings increase. For example, turning off the autobrake (which you'll probably want to do right away) increases your winnings by 10 percent, and if you opt for "simulation" damage, fuel, and tire wear as opposed to "cosmetic" or "limited," you can add another 15 percent on top of that. This setup ensures that while anyone who picks up Forza 3 can spend their entire career feeling like a winner, better drivers will earn more money in the process, and rightly so. Similarly, you get to keep more of your winnings if you don't have to spend them paying for damage incurred during a race, so although it's possible to win some races by driving aggressively and using opponents or walls to slow you down for corners, you won't be doing yourself (or your opposition) any favors in the long run.
That's especially true if your opponents are other online players or a friend that you're playing split-screen with, because retaliation is likely to cross their minds at some point. Forza 3's AI is more focused on the finish line than on forcing you off the track, which makes it superior to some of the players you're likely to meet online, but it's not an intelligence that's going to pose a threat to its human counterparts anytime soon. At times, AI drivers are superb: they jostle for position, they look for openings when other drivers falter, and they know when to back off if their attempt at an overtake starts looking perilous. Occasionally, though, these otherwise believable opponents will make such silly mistakes that you'll swear they must have fallen asleep at the wheel. At Barcelona's Circuit de Catalunya, for example, it's not nearly as uncommon as it should be to see opponents accelerate toward the Seat hairpin and fly off into the gravel without ever appearing to touch the brake pedal or the steering wheel, and it's not unheard of to see different opponents making the exact same error on consecutive laps. Race incidents like these aren't something you'll see often, especially if you're spending most of your time at the front of the pack, but if you're in a closely contested race, it's less satisfying to win as a result of an opponent's incompetence than it is to beat him out of a corner or slingshot past him on a straight.
It's also slightly less satisfying to cross the finish line first if you've felt the need to use Forza 3's new rewind feature during the race, but it's a great (if unoriginal) addition to the game regardless. If you consider yourself a purist, you might feel inclined to look down on this new feature and on anyone who uses it, and that's fine, because you don't have to use it if you don't want to, and nobody is ever going to have the option of using it while competing with you online. Furthermore, if you're from the no-rewind school of racing, your leaderboard times will always appear above those of drivers who have used the rewind to correct any number of their mistakes. The leaderboards also clearly display which assists drivers were using when they recorded their posted lap times, which might ultimately end up being a better incentive for you to turn them off than extra winnings are.
As in Forza 2, your winnings in Forza 3 can be used to buy new cars (more than 400 different models are available at launch), either direct from manufacturers or from other players via an auction house. However, it seems unlikely that Forza 3's auction house will be the hive of activity that Forza 2's was, not because it has changed for the worse, but because unless you're looking for a bargain or want to offload a car that you've been awarded, there are few reasons to go there. In Forza 2, one of the main reasons to buy a car from the auction house was that it had a great custom paint job and/or because it had already had money spent on upgrading and tuning it. You can still buy and sell cars this way if you choose to, but in Forza 3 you can also deal in tuning setups, paint jobs, and individual vinyl designs without having to attach them to cars. For example, if you re-create a favorite video game character on the hood of a car and you want to earn some credits selling it, you now have two options. You can either sell it as a vinyl that other players will be free to paste onto any car that they choose (safe in the knowledge that they won't be permitted to resell it subsequently) or incorporate it into a design for a specific model of car so that players who own one of those cars can apply it to their vehicle. It's a vastly superior system to that in the last game, and because potential buyers can search for designs either by typing in keywords or by using presets like "retro," "anime," and "realistic," there's a good chance that players who are interested in the kinds of things you create will find their way to your in-game storefront.
Forza 3's car models look fantastic in their showroom and real-world race liveries, but it's the designs being created by the community that are really making them pop. That's no mean feat, because the tools that designers have to work with, while clearly powerful, don't make life easy. If you're familiar with the design tools in Forza 2, then you might be disappointed or at least surprised to learn that they haven't changed much in Forza 3. You still work primarily with geometric shapes and generic-looking icons, you still group large numbers of them together to create race team logos or photo-realistic images of your favorite Brazilian supermodels, and it still takes a lot of work to create something worthwhile. It's time well spent, though, and because there's now an option to create designs on a perfectly flat surface before applying them to a car, you no longer have to use the roof of a Mini Cooper for a canvas. Would this aspect of the game be better if you could import images from Photoshop or just scan them in? Absolutely not. Sure, it would be easier, but it wouldn't be as rewarding, and more importantly it wouldn't be fair for players without access to the necessary hardware or software. It's also unlikely that the end results would look significantly better. Spend some time checking out the top designs, as rated by other players, and you'll realize that just about anything is possible with Forza 3's design tools; you just have to get good with them.
If you're more inclined to spend your time racing than playing with geometric shapes, there's still no reason you can't have great-looking cars. Just make sure you win enough credits to buy all of the designs you want. Whether you're racing in your single-player career or online with up to seven opponents, all of your winnings go into the same pot, and so do your experience points. Leveling up in Forza 3 doesn't benefit you in the way that you might expect it to in other genres, but every time you reach a new level, you're awarded a new car, so it can be a strong incentive to keep playing long after you've told yourself "just one more race." This is especially true later in your career, because the cars you're given are among the most desirable in the game--assuming you haven't rushed out and bought them already.
Just as you would in real life, it's not a bad idea to test-drive cars before you buy them. None of the cars in Forza 3 handle poorly, and all are delivered to your garage with perfect bodywork and spotlessly clean, accurately re-created interiors. Inevitably, there will be cars that suit your driving style better than others, though, and if you don't know much about tuning, it can be tough to tame a car that's proving problematic for you--even if you take advantage of the new quick upgrade option that optimizes your car for the class of competition that you want to use it in. In Career mode you're only able to use cars that you own, but every car in the game (as well as those in your garage) is available to you from the outset for use in single races, hot lap events, and multiplayer.
Online play was one of Forza 2's greatest strengths, and the same is true of Forza 3. It doesn't matter if you're looking to enjoy a private session with friends or hop into a race with random opponents--getting your car onto the starting grid couldn't be easier, and it's hard to imagine how the subsequent races could be any better. Even in multiplayer, detailed environments from all over the world fly by at speeds in excess of 200 miles per hour without ever posing a threat to the frame rate, and the game is very smart about knowing when to "ghost" players who have tried to take shortcuts or are in the mischievous minority who think it's hilarious to drive the wrong way and try to crash into other racers. In addition to regular races, online options include Drag and Drift events, as well as three different Tag variants, Elimination races, and team-based Cat and Mouse competitions. As the host of a session, the options that you have to customize these game types number in the dozens, and you can even force players to turn off certain assists or use a specific camera angle.
Those camera options include all of the usual suspects: bumper, hood, cockpit, chase near, and chase far. Another great feature of Forza 3, which will be familiar if you played the previous game, is that at any point during a single-player race or during a replay of a multiplayer race, you can pause the action to take a photograph. The in-game camera has more settings for you to tinker with than the cameras that most of us use in real life, and if you're good at photography (or even if you're not) it's possible to create some impressive images. This is especially true at new tracks like Italy's Amalfi Coast, Japan's Fujimo Kaido, and the United States' Sedona Raceway, which are great additions to the sizeable roster not only because they offer very different and enjoyable driving experiences, but also because they're set in some quite beautiful locations. If you choose to share photos by uploading them to your storefront they'll also appear on the official Forza Website, from which you can download them for posting in forums and the like.
Other than some load screens that stick around long enough to outstay their welcome before each race, the quality of Forza 3's presentation is uniformly excellent across every aspect of the game. The menus are clean and intuitive, the in-game visuals never fail to impress, and the default audio options prioritize the satisfying roars of the cars' respective engines over the 30-plus licensed tunes playing in the background. Artists on the soundtrack include The Hives, The Fratellis, Fall From Grace, Alkaline Trio, The Qemists, DJ Drunken Master, Logistics, and many more. Regardless of whether or not they're to your liking, there's no denying that the vast majority of the songs on the playlist make good driving tunes.
There's also no denying that Forza Motorsport 3 is a truly special racing game. Not only does it make simulation-style racing accessible to anyone with the inclination to give it a try, but it looks and sounds superb doing it and manages to foster an unusually strong sense of community along the way. If you have any interest whatsoever in racing games, even if you've never played one before, you'd do well to pay a visit to your local video game showroom and become a member of the Forza Motorsport 3 owners' club at your earliest convenience.
Wednesday, 22 June 2011
Stronghold Crusader Extreme
You can't go home again. That's the lesson of Stronghold Crusader Extreme, a revamping of Firefly Studios' classic 2002 real-time strategy game Stronghold Crusader. This minor reimagining of an oldie but goodie is several years late for the party, a real-time relic based on antiquated game mechanics and production values. It doesn't even add much in the way of new old-fashioned game content; it simply goes after hardcore fans of the original game with a new Extreme Trail mode of play that takes you up a ladder of impossibly murderous medieval skirmishes.
This is essentially a straight rehashing of the first Stronghold Crusader. Gameplay shows every bit of its age, so what you've got here is an old-school RTS game in which you build bases, gather resources, and grind out soldiers for endless combat. You take on the role of a medieval lord commanding a settlement in the dusty lands of the Crusades-era Middle East, and must build it up by constructing the usual barracks, farms, armories, and mines. Of course, the ultimate purpose is to use this economic backbone to fund an army of knights, spearmen, bowmen, and the like, and proceed to wipe your enemies off the map.
As with most RTS games from earlier in the decade, the skirmish maps in the 20-mission Extreme Trail campaign are all about speed, not strategy. The winner is always the one who can click the quickest, which makes matches play out more like fast-forwarded street brawls than real military engagements. This is actually one of the zippiest RTS games of all time, and spectacularly tough when compared to the nonextreme trail campaign in the original Stronghold Crusader. The pace has been so amped up and the maps so packed with enemies that the combat is frenzied and chaotic.
Expect to be toast early and often if you don't have some heavy playtime with the first game under your belt. Even with this experience (which you can gain here because you get the complete original game along with the supposedly new one), it's amazingly tough to emerge victorious from even a single one of the scenarios. Multiple enemies target you in all but the very first campaign mission, and this array of foes kicks off every match by immediately hurling columns of troops at your puny little village.
Maps cram all of the factions into such close quarters that it's impossible to get started on a reasonable army before the onslaught begins. Enemy armies are typically coming over the hill within no more than a minute or two from the start of a game. It's hard to figure out what you're supposed to do to stop these assaults, given that you're always stuck battling these massive forces with just the handful of knights and archers that you start with. You have the option of dropping in companies of spearmen and macemen on the fly at timed intervals, and can erect walls to somewhat stem the tide, but this seems to only delay the inevitable as steams of enemy columns constantly rush toward your keep. All you're ever doing is keeping your head above water, not building enough strength to take the fight to the enemy.
It feels like you're being asked to jam a square peg into a round hole, too, because the speedy scenarios don't fit the ponderous underlying game design. The Stronghold series has always been more of an economic simulation than a purely military one, considering its strong city-building flavor. So you can't just whip up barracks and start mass-producing knights and bowmen. Instead, you have to build mines and lumberyards to gather the ore and wood needed for weapons, along with farms to produce the cows needed for leather. Then you have to build armories, fletchers' huts, and tanneries. After that, you have to make swords, bows, leather armor, and the like. Finally, you can order troops into production...if you've got enough manpower by way of your peasant population. If not, you need to take a moment to toss up some hovels. After all of this, you can build an army. Or at least you would have been able to build an army if the bad guys hadn't already burned your keep to the ground.
Other aspects of the game don't fit with 2008. There is an online matching service, but it's hosted through the rather clunky GameSpy Arcade system, and some sort of conflict or bug with our initial install left us without the icon needed to activate this option on the multiplayer screen. The isometric visuals of the six-year-old original haven't been enhanced at all, so you're stuck with pixelated units and a maximum resolution of 1024x768 that stretches the display to the point of blurriness on a widescreen monitor. Not that there's much detail here to blur. Units look like scrambling insects that convulse their way across the bland, blocky landscape. Audio is just as dated. The music is a repetitive martial loop, battles are loaded with tinny metal clashes, and order acknowledgements are repetitive exclamations as bombastic and dumb as something you might hear during the dinner show at Medieval Times.
Only someone who has just stepped out of a time machine will have much patience for Stronghold Crusader Extreme. Aged, formulaic, and spectacularly difficult, the game isn't remotely appealing to a modern RTS audience.
This is essentially a straight rehashing of the first Stronghold Crusader. Gameplay shows every bit of its age, so what you've got here is an old-school RTS game in which you build bases, gather resources, and grind out soldiers for endless combat. You take on the role of a medieval lord commanding a settlement in the dusty lands of the Crusades-era Middle East, and must build it up by constructing the usual barracks, farms, armories, and mines. Of course, the ultimate purpose is to use this economic backbone to fund an army of knights, spearmen, bowmen, and the like, and proceed to wipe your enemies off the map.
As with most RTS games from earlier in the decade, the skirmish maps in the 20-mission Extreme Trail campaign are all about speed, not strategy. The winner is always the one who can click the quickest, which makes matches play out more like fast-forwarded street brawls than real military engagements. This is actually one of the zippiest RTS games of all time, and spectacularly tough when compared to the nonextreme trail campaign in the original Stronghold Crusader. The pace has been so amped up and the maps so packed with enemies that the combat is frenzied and chaotic.
Expect to be toast early and often if you don't have some heavy playtime with the first game under your belt. Even with this experience (which you can gain here because you get the complete original game along with the supposedly new one), it's amazingly tough to emerge victorious from even a single one of the scenarios. Multiple enemies target you in all but the very first campaign mission, and this array of foes kicks off every match by immediately hurling columns of troops at your puny little village.
Maps cram all of the factions into such close quarters that it's impossible to get started on a reasonable army before the onslaught begins. Enemy armies are typically coming over the hill within no more than a minute or two from the start of a game. It's hard to figure out what you're supposed to do to stop these assaults, given that you're always stuck battling these massive forces with just the handful of knights and archers that you start with. You have the option of dropping in companies of spearmen and macemen on the fly at timed intervals, and can erect walls to somewhat stem the tide, but this seems to only delay the inevitable as steams of enemy columns constantly rush toward your keep. All you're ever doing is keeping your head above water, not building enough strength to take the fight to the enemy.
It feels like you're being asked to jam a square peg into a round hole, too, because the speedy scenarios don't fit the ponderous underlying game design. The Stronghold series has always been more of an economic simulation than a purely military one, considering its strong city-building flavor. So you can't just whip up barracks and start mass-producing knights and bowmen. Instead, you have to build mines and lumberyards to gather the ore and wood needed for weapons, along with farms to produce the cows needed for leather. Then you have to build armories, fletchers' huts, and tanneries. After that, you have to make swords, bows, leather armor, and the like. Finally, you can order troops into production...if you've got enough manpower by way of your peasant population. If not, you need to take a moment to toss up some hovels. After all of this, you can build an army. Or at least you would have been able to build an army if the bad guys hadn't already burned your keep to the ground.
Other aspects of the game don't fit with 2008. There is an online matching service, but it's hosted through the rather clunky GameSpy Arcade system, and some sort of conflict or bug with our initial install left us without the icon needed to activate this option on the multiplayer screen. The isometric visuals of the six-year-old original haven't been enhanced at all, so you're stuck with pixelated units and a maximum resolution of 1024x768 that stretches the display to the point of blurriness on a widescreen monitor. Not that there's much detail here to blur. Units look like scrambling insects that convulse their way across the bland, blocky landscape. Audio is just as dated. The music is a repetitive martial loop, battles are loaded with tinny metal clashes, and order acknowledgements are repetitive exclamations as bombastic and dumb as something you might hear during the dinner show at Medieval Times.
Only someone who has just stepped out of a time machine will have much patience for Stronghold Crusader Extreme. Aged, formulaic, and spectacularly difficult, the game isn't remotely appealing to a modern RTS audience.
Stronghold
Stronghold is both a real-time combat game that focuses entirely on castle sieges and a village-management simulation in the vein of Zeus or The Settlers. The subject matter alone gives Stronghold a leg up. It's been years since a game let you pour boiling oil on invading hordes, and Stronghold simulates castle sieges well enough to recommend it to those who are interested in the premise. But it's a hesitant recommendation, due to a poor interface and mediocre campaigns.
There are two campaigns, one military and one economic. The economic campaign is made up of a handful of timed missions in which you must acquire a certain target amount of goods or gold. Occasional threats in the form of bandits and animals will require you to maintain a basic militia, but the mission goals are always economic. This campaign only serves to highlight the fact that as a management simulation, the game is pretty shallow. You build woodcutters, farmers, and miners, and the goods are brought to your storehouse. You build secondary producers, who use these goods to produce weapons and food.
You must also ensure you have enough food to keep your people happy and enough gold to hire soldiers. Since taxing your people makes them unhappy, and unhappy people will leave your kingdom, you must also find ways to keep your popularity high. This can be done by providing them with extra food, churches, or alehouses. Keeping your people happy is relatively unchallenging, although it seems complicated in theory. Most of the time, providing more food will be all you need to do, and the rest is unnecessary.
The economic and management elements of Stronghold are simple, but they are just the setup for the military game. The military campaign lets you defend against sieges, and siege other castles, as well as incorporate the economic elements. In the military campaign, you play the son of a king who was betrayed and murdered. His land was divided among four men: The Snake, The Pig, The Rat, and The Wolf. You must take back your father's land piece by piece.
The early stages of the campaign act as a tutorial, and a much better one than the game's actual tutorial option. In the beginning you will have only archers to defend your castles, and that will be all you need. Later, you'll have access to pikemen. Much later, you'll get the more advanced units such as swordsmen, engineers, and macemen. Part of the problem with the campaign is that you are stuck with the lowliest of units for the first half, and then things start to escalate rapidly. Your first castle siege is also your first time using engineers, who make your siege weapons, and the trial-by-fire element comes out of nowhere. Not only have you not had practice using the units, but it will take you some time to learn how to use them.
This suggests one of Stronghold's biggest problems: The interface makes little sense. There is a series of tabs on the bottom of the screen, each of which shows you different types of structures you can build. There's a farm tab, a food-production tab, a weapons-building tab, and so forth. Then there is a castle tab that lets you build walls. To build towers, you need to go to the castle tab and then click on the tower button, which opens the tower screen. Same for gatehouses. Moats are on the gatehouse screen. Or possibly the tower screen. There's no real rhyme or reason for where some things are located. Your barracks and armory are under the castle tab, but weapons manufacturers have their own tab.
Units pose their own set of interface problems. You can group units together with the standard Ctrl+number, but if you individually select any member of that group after that, he is removed from his group. If you select your entire army in order to move it, all of your groupings are lost. This system makes little sense and renders any sort of intelligent attack strategy almost impossible in the heat of battle.
Building castle walls is another issue. You aren't allowed to place buildings or objects in areas you can't see, and the low isometric viewpoint means that any area blocked by a building or another piece of wall is off-limits. You can rotate the map to view the field from a different angle, but towers and gatehouses can often block your view so that you never see a gap in your defenses. You can lower all buildings on the screen so that you can build without interference, but it's a crude solution to a serious problem. Moreover, certain types of buildings aren't allowed in every mission, which can cause confusion. One mission lets you build moats but not drawbridges. This can catch you off guard, as your villagers will have no way of bringing goods to the stockpile if they can't get over your moat.
Not that you'll be building moats often. Perhaps because of the problems above, very few of the campaign missions actually require you to build a decent castle. Usually, you'll start with a castle and only be required to defend and repair it as necessary. Defending a castle isn't very difficult, because the artificial intelligence of your enemies is terrible. Enemies will always enter from the same point and always make a beeline for the closest structure. You are told where the enemy will enter by way of signposts on the map, so you rarely need to defend more than one side of your castle. For most of the campaign, a large group of archers and crossbowmen will take down an entire approaching army as it marches in a straight line toward your keep.
Once you get to the latter half of the campaign, the game picks up. Having access to the advanced units makes things more interesting, as engineers pour boiling oil on enemies wielding battering rams, incoming units die in pit traps, pikemen try to fill moats as archers rain arrows down on them, macemen knock encroaching soldiers off ladders, and walls crumble under the bombardment of siege weapons and tunnelers, who burrow under walls to damage their foundations. The action can be exciting enough to watch that you forget all of the game's problems and just enjoy watching your opponent's--or your own--castle fall.
Visually, the game is reminiscent of Age of Empires II. The buildings look good, but not great, and the same can be said of the units. The animations are well done, especially the motion blur on the arrows and projectiles as they fly through the air. The soundtrack is dramatic, while the sound effects consist of fairly typical funny comments from units and ambient building sounds.
Campaign play isn't your only option, and if nothing else, Stronghold provides a great deal of variety. There are a number of individual combat and economic scenarios, as well as a variety of stand-alone modes, both peaceful and combat-oriented, that let you build your castle at will. The multiplayer options include a number of different games, and it's a better challenge to defend a castle against more intelligent opponents. Stronghold has some rather serious problems. But if you can get past them, or learn to work with them, the game gives you enough options that you'll have dozens of hours of sieges and defenses ahead of you.
There are two campaigns, one military and one economic. The economic campaign is made up of a handful of timed missions in which you must acquire a certain target amount of goods or gold. Occasional threats in the form of bandits and animals will require you to maintain a basic militia, but the mission goals are always economic. This campaign only serves to highlight the fact that as a management simulation, the game is pretty shallow. You build woodcutters, farmers, and miners, and the goods are brought to your storehouse. You build secondary producers, who use these goods to produce weapons and food.
You must also ensure you have enough food to keep your people happy and enough gold to hire soldiers. Since taxing your people makes them unhappy, and unhappy people will leave your kingdom, you must also find ways to keep your popularity high. This can be done by providing them with extra food, churches, or alehouses. Keeping your people happy is relatively unchallenging, although it seems complicated in theory. Most of the time, providing more food will be all you need to do, and the rest is unnecessary.
The economic and management elements of Stronghold are simple, but they are just the setup for the military game. The military campaign lets you defend against sieges, and siege other castles, as well as incorporate the economic elements. In the military campaign, you play the son of a king who was betrayed and murdered. His land was divided among four men: The Snake, The Pig, The Rat, and The Wolf. You must take back your father's land piece by piece.
The early stages of the campaign act as a tutorial, and a much better one than the game's actual tutorial option. In the beginning you will have only archers to defend your castles, and that will be all you need. Later, you'll have access to pikemen. Much later, you'll get the more advanced units such as swordsmen, engineers, and macemen. Part of the problem with the campaign is that you are stuck with the lowliest of units for the first half, and then things start to escalate rapidly. Your first castle siege is also your first time using engineers, who make your siege weapons, and the trial-by-fire element comes out of nowhere. Not only have you not had practice using the units, but it will take you some time to learn how to use them.
This suggests one of Stronghold's biggest problems: The interface makes little sense. There is a series of tabs on the bottom of the screen, each of which shows you different types of structures you can build. There's a farm tab, a food-production tab, a weapons-building tab, and so forth. Then there is a castle tab that lets you build walls. To build towers, you need to go to the castle tab and then click on the tower button, which opens the tower screen. Same for gatehouses. Moats are on the gatehouse screen. Or possibly the tower screen. There's no real rhyme or reason for where some things are located. Your barracks and armory are under the castle tab, but weapons manufacturers have their own tab.
Units pose their own set of interface problems. You can group units together with the standard Ctrl+number, but if you individually select any member of that group after that, he is removed from his group. If you select your entire army in order to move it, all of your groupings are lost. This system makes little sense and renders any sort of intelligent attack strategy almost impossible in the heat of battle.
Building castle walls is another issue. You aren't allowed to place buildings or objects in areas you can't see, and the low isometric viewpoint means that any area blocked by a building or another piece of wall is off-limits. You can rotate the map to view the field from a different angle, but towers and gatehouses can often block your view so that you never see a gap in your defenses. You can lower all buildings on the screen so that you can build without interference, but it's a crude solution to a serious problem. Moreover, certain types of buildings aren't allowed in every mission, which can cause confusion. One mission lets you build moats but not drawbridges. This can catch you off guard, as your villagers will have no way of bringing goods to the stockpile if they can't get over your moat.
Not that you'll be building moats often. Perhaps because of the problems above, very few of the campaign missions actually require you to build a decent castle. Usually, you'll start with a castle and only be required to defend and repair it as necessary. Defending a castle isn't very difficult, because the artificial intelligence of your enemies is terrible. Enemies will always enter from the same point and always make a beeline for the closest structure. You are told where the enemy will enter by way of signposts on the map, so you rarely need to defend more than one side of your castle. For most of the campaign, a large group of archers and crossbowmen will take down an entire approaching army as it marches in a straight line toward your keep.
Once you get to the latter half of the campaign, the game picks up. Having access to the advanced units makes things more interesting, as engineers pour boiling oil on enemies wielding battering rams, incoming units die in pit traps, pikemen try to fill moats as archers rain arrows down on them, macemen knock encroaching soldiers off ladders, and walls crumble under the bombardment of siege weapons and tunnelers, who burrow under walls to damage their foundations. The action can be exciting enough to watch that you forget all of the game's problems and just enjoy watching your opponent's--or your own--castle fall.
Visually, the game is reminiscent of Age of Empires II. The buildings look good, but not great, and the same can be said of the units. The animations are well done, especially the motion blur on the arrows and projectiles as they fly through the air. The soundtrack is dramatic, while the sound effects consist of fairly typical funny comments from units and ambient building sounds.
Campaign play isn't your only option, and if nothing else, Stronghold provides a great deal of variety. There are a number of individual combat and economic scenarios, as well as a variety of stand-alone modes, both peaceful and combat-oriented, that let you build your castle at will. The multiplayer options include a number of different games, and it's a better challenge to defend a castle against more intelligent opponents. Stronghold has some rather serious problems. But if you can get past them, or learn to work with them, the game gives you enough options that you'll have dozens of hours of sieges and defenses ahead of you.
Stronghold Crusader
Last year's Stronghold was a slightly uneven combination of city builder and real-time strategy game, with an emphasis on siege warfare. It had the distinction of being the only castle simulation from a major publisher since Interplay released Quicksilver's Castles II in 1992. Aspiring warlords could forgive Stronghold's shortcomings, since the original game gave them the opportunity to build and raze walls, pillage countrysides, and launch cattle from catapults. Firefly Studios has now polished up its old game nicely and has sent it on a long road trip into the Crusades.
Stronghold: Crusader is the stand-alone successor to Stronghold, meaning you don't need the original Stronghold to play it. It takes Stronghold out of Europe and into the Holy Lands, giving it a tighter focus and a more exotic flavor. The economic missions that had you racing against the clock to fulfill contrived objectives have been removed from the game. Instead, Stronghold: Crusader places more emphasis on the fine art of defending or storming a castle. After all, isn't this what you want when you pick up a box with a knight standing in front of a castle? When players first looked at the box for the original Stronghold, they probably wouldn't have guessed that they'd be spending their time accumulating 500 units of cheese.
Indeed, the original Stronghold divided its single-player missions into two types: military and economic, though the latter, which generally involved raising crops and stockpiling resources, wasn't as popular as the military missions. It also had a single-player skirmish mode and head-to-head multiplayer. But Stronghold: Crusader presents you with many more options. For instance, you can play skirmish games against AI opponents on a number of different maps, even in multiplayer. Some are completely even playing fields, while some feature interesting balance dilemmas, giving advantages and disadvantages to each player. The skirmish maps can be played against your choice of AI opponents or in multiplayer games.
However, players who are new to Stronghold's economic model, which actually folds elegantly into its combat model without upstaging it, will likely want to start out by playing with the castle-builder option. This is a sandbox mode that, like in the original game, lets you learn the unique features of Crusader's new desert maps without having to worry about fielding an army to defend against attacks.
But the centerpiece of the single-player game is the "crusader trail," which presents a series of 50 battles, each more difficult than the last. As you play, your performance determines the ongoing date, which serves as your score. You can go backward to replay old missions, and if you do better, the date will roll back. Although this doesn't have much impact on the actual missions, it's an interesting alternative to tracking a score based on points.
Unlike the missions in Stronghold's military campaign, most of the missions in the crusader trail let you build you own castle. This makes it more like a series of skirmishes than the original game's linear sequence of canned scenarios with prebuilt castles. The crusader trail missions do a good job of incorporating specific units and strategies, and you will gradually improve your skills as it ramps up the difficulty level. In addition to a basic tutorial, there are four historical campaigns, in which each chapter highlights specific game elements, such as which units are best suited for which purposes, how to manage your taxes, and the differences between various crops. Each mission in these campaigns is like a puzzle with a historical context, which, once solved, will teach you to play better. Stronghold: Crusader has numerous options to introduce new players to the game as well as plenty of challenges for veterans of the original Stronghold.
Stronghold: Crusader makes some important changes to the dynamics of the original game. Most significant is the addition of seven new Arabian mercenary units, some fairly redundant (Arabian bows are just weaker archers), some potentially overpowered (the horse archers are a potent combination of speed and ranged attack), and some adding unique game dynamics (assassins can secretly open gate towers to let your units into an enemy's castle). The new units are all hired from the mercenary camp, which can be built cheaply as soon as you start building your castle. To recruit them, you don't have to harvest resources, construct weapons, and accumulate an arsenal in your armory, like you have to with their European counterparts. Instead, just fork over some gold, and these new Arabian units will show up.
The fact that military units come into play much more quickly in Stronghold: Crusader than they did in the original game has a dramatic effect on gameplay. Because the marketplace can quickly give you gold, which can now quickly give you an army, it's an important military building. If you're attacked, you can convert your goods to gold and hire instant defenders. To get down to conquering, there's no immediate need for iron, leather, wood, tanners, blacksmiths, or pole turners.
To be fair, mercenaries aren't as powerful as the traditional military units, but they definitely change the way Stronghold is played. Some of the scenarios can be easily beaten by simply selling off your starting goods, using the gold to hire mercenaries, and then rushing the AI. Of course, this also means you'll be attacked much earlier in a scenario. There's nothing quite so annoying as watching a mob of cheap slaves torching your outlying farms before you can marshal your defenses. The end result is that Stronghold: Crusader plays much more like a traditional combat-oriented real-time strategy game than its predecessor.
There are some other differences between Stronghold: Crusader and the previous game that may seem subtle at first. For instance, religion and ale have more impact on your people's happiness in Stronghold: Crusader. Religion cost too much gold and ale required too many steps in the resource chain to be really useful in the original game. But in Stronghold: Crusader, they have a more powerful benefit--they are effective ways to offset high taxes, food shortages, and crowding. Even better, you can improve efficiency by adorning your castle with more "bad things," like gallows and dungeons, while serving up religion and ale to counter the happiness penalties. Although these may seem like minor tweaks, they do a good job of adding more choices to how you play.
After fighting Stronghold's European warlords (who make a return appearance in Crusader), it's nice to get out and see the world. The desert terrain and buildings look great, breathing a lot of new life into the game's detailed 2D engine. The new music is rousing and distinctive, and it's always a thrill to hear the war cry when you mass-select a group of soldiers and give them attack orders. Visually and aurally, Stronghold: Crusader certainly does justice to its subject matter.
The Middle Eastern setting allows for a new architectural look and terrain set, but unlike the changes to the architecture, the changes to the terrain aren't simply cosmetic. Because you can't build farms in the desert, the patches of fertile land on some maps are important strategic points. This also makes Crusader play like a more conventional RTS, since this can take the focus off the castles themselves. Now each side has to secure fertile land to maintain a food supply in these barren environments.
Stronghold: Crusader's interface still has some of the same problems that the first game had. The building tabs are still haphazardly arranged at the bottom of the screen. There's no way to jump to the subject of important messages such as "We're under attack!" Stronghold could use more tooltips, range indicators for missile units, and a few more hotkeys to keep you from having to wade through your castles and armies to get where you need to go. Because there are no effective unit formations, the tactical AI still requires a fair amount of micromanagement to mount a successful siege, and computer opponents still seem fond of sending units in a steady trickle rather than amassing effective assaults.
But other than these minor problems, Stronghold: Crusader is a marked improvement over the previous game. Considering its new campaign options, more-satisfying single-player missions, and tweaked gameplay, it's a safe bet that fans of the original game will have even more fun storming the castle.
Stronghold: Crusader is the stand-alone successor to Stronghold, meaning you don't need the original Stronghold to play it. It takes Stronghold out of Europe and into the Holy Lands, giving it a tighter focus and a more exotic flavor. The economic missions that had you racing against the clock to fulfill contrived objectives have been removed from the game. Instead, Stronghold: Crusader places more emphasis on the fine art of defending or storming a castle. After all, isn't this what you want when you pick up a box with a knight standing in front of a castle? When players first looked at the box for the original Stronghold, they probably wouldn't have guessed that they'd be spending their time accumulating 500 units of cheese.
Indeed, the original Stronghold divided its single-player missions into two types: military and economic, though the latter, which generally involved raising crops and stockpiling resources, wasn't as popular as the military missions. It also had a single-player skirmish mode and head-to-head multiplayer. But Stronghold: Crusader presents you with many more options. For instance, you can play skirmish games against AI opponents on a number of different maps, even in multiplayer. Some are completely even playing fields, while some feature interesting balance dilemmas, giving advantages and disadvantages to each player. The skirmish maps can be played against your choice of AI opponents or in multiplayer games.
However, players who are new to Stronghold's economic model, which actually folds elegantly into its combat model without upstaging it, will likely want to start out by playing with the castle-builder option. This is a sandbox mode that, like in the original game, lets you learn the unique features of Crusader's new desert maps without having to worry about fielding an army to defend against attacks.
But the centerpiece of the single-player game is the "crusader trail," which presents a series of 50 battles, each more difficult than the last. As you play, your performance determines the ongoing date, which serves as your score. You can go backward to replay old missions, and if you do better, the date will roll back. Although this doesn't have much impact on the actual missions, it's an interesting alternative to tracking a score based on points.
Unlike the missions in Stronghold's military campaign, most of the missions in the crusader trail let you build you own castle. This makes it more like a series of skirmishes than the original game's linear sequence of canned scenarios with prebuilt castles. The crusader trail missions do a good job of incorporating specific units and strategies, and you will gradually improve your skills as it ramps up the difficulty level. In addition to a basic tutorial, there are four historical campaigns, in which each chapter highlights specific game elements, such as which units are best suited for which purposes, how to manage your taxes, and the differences between various crops. Each mission in these campaigns is like a puzzle with a historical context, which, once solved, will teach you to play better. Stronghold: Crusader has numerous options to introduce new players to the game as well as plenty of challenges for veterans of the original Stronghold.
Stronghold: Crusader makes some important changes to the dynamics of the original game. Most significant is the addition of seven new Arabian mercenary units, some fairly redundant (Arabian bows are just weaker archers), some potentially overpowered (the horse archers are a potent combination of speed and ranged attack), and some adding unique game dynamics (assassins can secretly open gate towers to let your units into an enemy's castle). The new units are all hired from the mercenary camp, which can be built cheaply as soon as you start building your castle. To recruit them, you don't have to harvest resources, construct weapons, and accumulate an arsenal in your armory, like you have to with their European counterparts. Instead, just fork over some gold, and these new Arabian units will show up.
The fact that military units come into play much more quickly in Stronghold: Crusader than they did in the original game has a dramatic effect on gameplay. Because the marketplace can quickly give you gold, which can now quickly give you an army, it's an important military building. If you're attacked, you can convert your goods to gold and hire instant defenders. To get down to conquering, there's no immediate need for iron, leather, wood, tanners, blacksmiths, or pole turners.
To be fair, mercenaries aren't as powerful as the traditional military units, but they definitely change the way Stronghold is played. Some of the scenarios can be easily beaten by simply selling off your starting goods, using the gold to hire mercenaries, and then rushing the AI. Of course, this also means you'll be attacked much earlier in a scenario. There's nothing quite so annoying as watching a mob of cheap slaves torching your outlying farms before you can marshal your defenses. The end result is that Stronghold: Crusader plays much more like a traditional combat-oriented real-time strategy game than its predecessor.
There are some other differences between Stronghold: Crusader and the previous game that may seem subtle at first. For instance, religion and ale have more impact on your people's happiness in Stronghold: Crusader. Religion cost too much gold and ale required too many steps in the resource chain to be really useful in the original game. But in Stronghold: Crusader, they have a more powerful benefit--they are effective ways to offset high taxes, food shortages, and crowding. Even better, you can improve efficiency by adorning your castle with more "bad things," like gallows and dungeons, while serving up religion and ale to counter the happiness penalties. Although these may seem like minor tweaks, they do a good job of adding more choices to how you play.
After fighting Stronghold's European warlords (who make a return appearance in Crusader), it's nice to get out and see the world. The desert terrain and buildings look great, breathing a lot of new life into the game's detailed 2D engine. The new music is rousing and distinctive, and it's always a thrill to hear the war cry when you mass-select a group of soldiers and give them attack orders. Visually and aurally, Stronghold: Crusader certainly does justice to its subject matter.
The Middle Eastern setting allows for a new architectural look and terrain set, but unlike the changes to the architecture, the changes to the terrain aren't simply cosmetic. Because you can't build farms in the desert, the patches of fertile land on some maps are important strategic points. This also makes Crusader play like a more conventional RTS, since this can take the focus off the castles themselves. Now each side has to secure fertile land to maintain a food supply in these barren environments.
Stronghold: Crusader's interface still has some of the same problems that the first game had. The building tabs are still haphazardly arranged at the bottom of the screen. There's no way to jump to the subject of important messages such as "We're under attack!" Stronghold could use more tooltips, range indicators for missile units, and a few more hotkeys to keep you from having to wade through your castles and armies to get where you need to go. Because there are no effective unit formations, the tactical AI still requires a fair amount of micromanagement to mount a successful siege, and computer opponents still seem fond of sending units in a steady trickle rather than amassing effective assaults.
But other than these minor problems, Stronghold: Crusader is a marked improvement over the previous game. Considering its new campaign options, more-satisfying single-player missions, and tweaked gameplay, it's a safe bet that fans of the original game will have even more fun storming the castle.
Stronghold Legends
It's gotten to the point that you don't know what you're going to get when you open the box of a new Stronghold game. The castle-building franchise from Hartford's Firefly Studios has gone through some significant changes over the past two years, but the latest version throws the whole formula out the window. Stronghold Legends moves the series out of the history books and into D&D-styled real-time strategy territory with mythical heroes, dragons, and dwarves. Yet while this is admittedly a nifty idea, the switch from reality to fantasy kills the historical authenticity that has long been a trademark of the Stronghold line. Even worse, everything seems to have been crowbarred into the aged Stronghold 2 engine, resulting in a generic RTS that has more than a few serious technical and design issues.
The actual gameplay in Stronghold has little to do with the earlier games in the franchise. Here, instead of building a castle and getting knee-deep into the nitty-gritty of what it was like to live during the Middle Ages, you sign up for three campaigns out of medieval mythology. In the opener, you take on the role of King Arthur, battling against the Saxons for control of Britain. In the others, you play as Siegfried, the German dragon slayer and star of a Wagnerian opera, and Vlad the Impaler, the Transylvanian Turk-killer best known today as the bloody inspiration for Dracula.
But nothing of interest has been done to develop these storylines or settings. Buildings follow the RTS template and feature barracks, armories, granaries, and so forth. Resource gathering goes beyond the usual food, wood, and stone, but it does so by adding an annoying level of micromanagement to what should be a straightforward grind of building armies and attacking the bad guys. A game this simplistic probably shouldn't demand the collection and processing of any resources, as mission objectives always involve straightforward building armies and killing enemies.
All of the soldiers featured in each faction are virtually identical. There is little difference here whether you're fighting on behalf of the evil forces of Dracula or the noble knights of King Arthur. Also, since the units themselves are generic, the gee-whiz factor of getting to play Count Blah and his evil minions in an RTS fades quickly. You get little aside from the same old pikemen, archers, crossbowmen, and swordsmen. There is only so much that a developer can do with a medieval setting, of course, but no effort was made to provide significantly different troops to represent the nationalities and time periods represented. A millennium passed between the King Arthur campaign of the mid-400s and the Vlad campaign of the mid-15th century. You would think that more than the color of the shirts would have changed during that time.
At least the three sides vary quite a bit when it comes to the menageries of mythological beasties that they can throw into battle. Heroes like Arthur, Merlin, Siegfried, and Vlad have special powers that give them the ability to pull off feats like casting spells, knocking down walls, and summoning magical creatures. In the Arthur scenarios, you have access to heroic knights and wizards straight out of Malory; in the Siegfried ones, you deal with figures out of Norse legend such as frost giants; and in the Dracula missions, you get to play with Halloween refugees like creepers and werewolves. All of the units fit perfectly into their settings and make the game feel like a collection of folktales come to life.
Yet while these beasties add color to Stronghold Legends, and some cool moments like giants stomping pesky soldiers with their feet and Merlin blasting archers with lightning bolts, they don't do much for gameplay. For starters, most are underpowered. Dragons, for instance, are second-rate compared to Tolkien's Smaug and can be taken out by well-placed archers. Giants can be ganged up on by regular infantry grunts like pikemen and felled quicker than you can say fee-fi-fo-fum. And just breathing on the frail Merlin seems to kill him. More play testing was also needed to root out some big problems with mission design and artificial intelligence. Most missions are laid out in an extremely linear fashion. You start at point A and kill everything until you reach point B, you defend a fortress until the clock runs out, and so on. But lack of imagination is the least of the game's issues. Enemy troops often continue patrolling mindlessly and actually ignore huge columns of your soldiers even after you've just smashed down or climbed a castle wall. They often don't react to crossbowmen or archers firing away at them, either, and sometimes choose to walk away from battles or abandon sieges. The narrator who provides tips on enemy attacks frequently comes out with lines like, "Woodsmen have seen a band of enemy troops heading this way!" right before they turn around and head back home. The game was obviously shipped without a fully functioning AI.
It also wasn't shipped with a modern graphics engine. Stronghold Legends looks like it was made with the same dated 3D technology that powered Stronghold 2, which unfortunately means that it looks like it was released around 2002. Visuals are drab and dingy overall, with blocky castles, dull building styles with little in the way of convincing detail, and terribly animated units that wobble back and forth when they run, like packs of chain-mail-clad Fat Alberts. Because there is no collision detection, battles between human armies immediately degenerate into undulating, colored blobs with no way to tell what's going on or who's winning.
Audio quality is a bit better, thanks to suitably cheesy voice acting during scenarios and soldiers' shouts during charges that really get the blood moving. Lines are repeated way too often, though, and frequently misstate what's actually going on. Once per mission, you'll usually hear something completely incongruous such as, "The enemy's ladders are on the walls!" even though you're not actually defending any walls at the time.
And even though Firefly should know its way around this engine by now, there are some serious bugs here. Crashes to the desktop are an infrequent occurrence, but the big problem is that units rarely respond properly to commands. They run by targeted enemies and often turn their backs on foes, giving them a free shot or two at you while you slowly rotate around to attack. Mass attacks directed at specific baddies always result in some units attacking and many others just standing around cooling their heels. It's best not to attack directly at all, as you're more likely to get everyone in on the action if you move close to the enemy and let the AI take over from there. Installing the version 1.10 patch didn't seem to rectify any of these issues, either.
There are some appealing alternatives to the campaigns, although considering all the gameplay problems and bugs, it's hard to contemplate why anyone would want to bother with them. Still, the three Legends Trails sets of linked skirmish maps is an intriguing idea that plays like a trio of solo ladders. Custom skirmishes with up to four players can also be played, both online and off. There does seem to be a fair number of people looking for matches online, too, so you can find games pretty easily. And a map editor is also included for players who want to roll their own skirmish scenarios.
The developers were obviously going for a you-got-your-chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter moment here by throwing D&D into their medieval simulation series, but Stronghold Legends is just another second-rate RTS. While incorporating giants and dragons into the mix may seem like a natural fit these days, as any game with castle walls in it seems to demand the addition of Tolkienesque beasties to knock them down, you've got to do more than just toss such creatures in with generic armies and buggy gameplay. This is an interesting concept that deserved more careful attention than the designers gave it.
The actual gameplay in Stronghold has little to do with the earlier games in the franchise. Here, instead of building a castle and getting knee-deep into the nitty-gritty of what it was like to live during the Middle Ages, you sign up for three campaigns out of medieval mythology. In the opener, you take on the role of King Arthur, battling against the Saxons for control of Britain. In the others, you play as Siegfried, the German dragon slayer and star of a Wagnerian opera, and Vlad the Impaler, the Transylvanian Turk-killer best known today as the bloody inspiration for Dracula.
But nothing of interest has been done to develop these storylines or settings. Buildings follow the RTS template and feature barracks, armories, granaries, and so forth. Resource gathering goes beyond the usual food, wood, and stone, but it does so by adding an annoying level of micromanagement to what should be a straightforward grind of building armies and attacking the bad guys. A game this simplistic probably shouldn't demand the collection and processing of any resources, as mission objectives always involve straightforward building armies and killing enemies.
All of the soldiers featured in each faction are virtually identical. There is little difference here whether you're fighting on behalf of the evil forces of Dracula or the noble knights of King Arthur. Also, since the units themselves are generic, the gee-whiz factor of getting to play Count Blah and his evil minions in an RTS fades quickly. You get little aside from the same old pikemen, archers, crossbowmen, and swordsmen. There is only so much that a developer can do with a medieval setting, of course, but no effort was made to provide significantly different troops to represent the nationalities and time periods represented. A millennium passed between the King Arthur campaign of the mid-400s and the Vlad campaign of the mid-15th century. You would think that more than the color of the shirts would have changed during that time.
At least the three sides vary quite a bit when it comes to the menageries of mythological beasties that they can throw into battle. Heroes like Arthur, Merlin, Siegfried, and Vlad have special powers that give them the ability to pull off feats like casting spells, knocking down walls, and summoning magical creatures. In the Arthur scenarios, you have access to heroic knights and wizards straight out of Malory; in the Siegfried ones, you deal with figures out of Norse legend such as frost giants; and in the Dracula missions, you get to play with Halloween refugees like creepers and werewolves. All of the units fit perfectly into their settings and make the game feel like a collection of folktales come to life.
Yet while these beasties add color to Stronghold Legends, and some cool moments like giants stomping pesky soldiers with their feet and Merlin blasting archers with lightning bolts, they don't do much for gameplay. For starters, most are underpowered. Dragons, for instance, are second-rate compared to Tolkien's Smaug and can be taken out by well-placed archers. Giants can be ganged up on by regular infantry grunts like pikemen and felled quicker than you can say fee-fi-fo-fum. And just breathing on the frail Merlin seems to kill him. More play testing was also needed to root out some big problems with mission design and artificial intelligence. Most missions are laid out in an extremely linear fashion. You start at point A and kill everything until you reach point B, you defend a fortress until the clock runs out, and so on. But lack of imagination is the least of the game's issues. Enemy troops often continue patrolling mindlessly and actually ignore huge columns of your soldiers even after you've just smashed down or climbed a castle wall. They often don't react to crossbowmen or archers firing away at them, either, and sometimes choose to walk away from battles or abandon sieges. The narrator who provides tips on enemy attacks frequently comes out with lines like, "Woodsmen have seen a band of enemy troops heading this way!" right before they turn around and head back home. The game was obviously shipped without a fully functioning AI.
It also wasn't shipped with a modern graphics engine. Stronghold Legends looks like it was made with the same dated 3D technology that powered Stronghold 2, which unfortunately means that it looks like it was released around 2002. Visuals are drab and dingy overall, with blocky castles, dull building styles with little in the way of convincing detail, and terribly animated units that wobble back and forth when they run, like packs of chain-mail-clad Fat Alberts. Because there is no collision detection, battles between human armies immediately degenerate into undulating, colored blobs with no way to tell what's going on or who's winning.
Audio quality is a bit better, thanks to suitably cheesy voice acting during scenarios and soldiers' shouts during charges that really get the blood moving. Lines are repeated way too often, though, and frequently misstate what's actually going on. Once per mission, you'll usually hear something completely incongruous such as, "The enemy's ladders are on the walls!" even though you're not actually defending any walls at the time.
And even though Firefly should know its way around this engine by now, there are some serious bugs here. Crashes to the desktop are an infrequent occurrence, but the big problem is that units rarely respond properly to commands. They run by targeted enemies and often turn their backs on foes, giving them a free shot or two at you while you slowly rotate around to attack. Mass attacks directed at specific baddies always result in some units attacking and many others just standing around cooling their heels. It's best not to attack directly at all, as you're more likely to get everyone in on the action if you move close to the enemy and let the AI take over from there. Installing the version 1.10 patch didn't seem to rectify any of these issues, either.
There are some appealing alternatives to the campaigns, although considering all the gameplay problems and bugs, it's hard to contemplate why anyone would want to bother with them. Still, the three Legends Trails sets of linked skirmish maps is an intriguing idea that plays like a trio of solo ladders. Custom skirmishes with up to four players can also be played, both online and off. There does seem to be a fair number of people looking for matches online, too, so you can find games pretty easily. And a map editor is also included for players who want to roll their own skirmish scenarios.
The developers were obviously going for a you-got-your-chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter moment here by throwing D&D into their medieval simulation series, but Stronghold Legends is just another second-rate RTS. While incorporating giants and dragons into the mix may seem like a natural fit these days, as any game with castle walls in it seems to demand the addition of Tolkienesque beasties to knock them down, you've got to do more than just toss such creatures in with generic armies and buggy gameplay. This is an interesting concept that deserved more careful attention than the designers gave it.
Stronghold 2
Store your food and raise the drawbridge, for Stronghold 2 has been released and is ready to lay siege to your computer. For those of you unfamiliar with the Stronghold series, or castle sim games in general, Stronghold 2 puts you in command of a castle. You must feed your peasants and keep them happy, build walls and towers to protect your property, and raise an army to lay siege to your opponent's castles. While there have been plenty of additions made to Stronghold 2 over its predecessor (in addition to the implementation of some good ideas), a poor story, weak artificial intelligence, and plenty of bugs mar what otherwise could have been a simple yet fun castle-building game.
In Stronghold 2, you have a lord who presides over a keep. Peasants will flock to your keep as long as they're kept happy. Happiness is dependent on several factors, including how well they eat, the amount of rats in your castle, and whether you provide entertainment for them. You'll gather various resources to place in your storehouse, and industry workers can take these resources to create advanced items, like bread, ale, and weapons. However, there aren't any complicated manufacturing trees, so don't expect an intricate economic sim game. Stronghold 2 is designed so you can focus on building up your castle and raising an army.
There are a few issues with the gameplay that are worth noting. You can't shut off just one building. You have to either shut down the entire industry or sell the building. For example, if you build three lumber camps but only want two to operate at a given moment, you have to sell the third camp. Also, some of your workers will, on occasion, turn to crime, thus abandoning the industry in which they were working. And, unfortunately, you can't shift a worker from one industry to the abandoned one. This poses a problem when the abandoned post is critical, such as your gong pit. If your gong pit worker leaves his post, and you don't notice, gong will pile up, and your peasants will be unhappy. If you're already on the breaking point of happiness/unhappiness, people will start leaving the castle (and, thus, they'll start to leave other critical industries), putting you in a feedback loop you may never recover from. These are micromanagement issues you shouldn't have to face. More alerts for when critical posts get abandoned would have been a big help.
There are two campaigns in Stronghold 2: peace and war. They're what you'd expect. The peace campaign focuses on economic missions. The king is displeased with his vassals, so you must step up and fix the economy of his nation. You'll focus on collecting a set number of resources in a mission without worry of being sieged. The most fighting you'll see is against bandits or wolves. Since the economic portion of the game is pretty basic, this campaign can be boring if you expect heavy micromanagement. The war campaign, on the other hand, throws you into missions where you not only have to build up your castle, but also attack an enemy or defend your lands. The storyline of the war campaign is weak due to boring cutscenes and poor voice acting, but the missions are structured nicely. Some strategy games can be repetitive because you have to rebuild a base every time you start a new mission. In Stronghold 2, each mission is divided into several submissions played on the same map. As a result, you don't have to rebuild a castle every time you start a new objective.
The two campaigns aren't particularly challenging. The peace campaign can have some tricky situations, but you're not going to burst your brain trying to figure out how to win. The war campaign is a cakewalk, especially once you discover the limitations of the AI. You may have to restart a few missions, but you'll soon realize that the computer follows the same strategy every time. Whether you're defending or attacking, you won't find a worthy opponent in the AI.
When being sieged, it's very easy to adapt your defenses to thwart the attack. Some missions pit you against seemingly impossible odds. The easiest way to defend against these attacks is to build a bunch of wooden walls outside your main stone ones. Ladder men can't scale these walls, and enemy troops will happily hack at the wooden walls while under heavy fire from your archers. Even if the computer has siege equipment, it will be used against your wooden walls instead of your towers or your defenders. Rarely will the computer ever be able to get to your stone walls, much less your lord (if your lord dies, you lose, by the way). When you're on the offensive, the AI won't do much to lift your siege. You can methodically pick off defenders and towers one by one with your siege equipment, all without worry of retaliation. It makes the game really boring and simplistic, which is unfortunate, because there's high potential for great battles.
We wouldn't have had to resort to cheesy tactics if the other castle defenses weren't broken. You can mount logs and rocks on your walls that can be released to cause damage to soldiers underneath. The problem is that once ladder men get close to these walls, these defense mechanisms mysteriously disappear. It's extremely irritating to spend a bunch of gold on these defenses only to have them vanish. Of course, you can exploit this to your own advantage when you're the attacker.
Once you complete the campaigns, which can take around 15 to 20 hours, there's plenty to keep you occupied, if you so desire. You can play a free-build mode, where you just build up your economy and castle with no objectives. Kingmaker is the skirmish mode where you square off against computer or human opponents in multiplayer. Single-player skirmish suffers from the same faults as above, but multiplayer has a lot more to offer in terms of strategy and castle development. Human opponents can use the fairly large number of units and siege weapons to formulate counterstrategies that make gameplay much more rewarding. You can play multiplayer using a LAN or the in-game browser, which is rudimentary but gets the job done. Unfortunately, multiplayer is also buggy, though. In one game, we were suddenly dropped to the main menu. In another game, it appeared that all three of our opponents were dropped without warning. We didn't even notice until it became apparent that one of our siege victims wasn't responding to our attacks.
The biggest change between Stronghold 2 and its predecessor is the addition of a 3D engine. You can zoom in and spin the map around to accurately place walls and structures. However, the 3D engine isn't particularly flattering, because the graphics aren't very good. Aside from the lackluster combat animations, units tend to clump together in combat, making it difficult to control individual units or to even tell what's going on in a fight. Units clip through each other, so you'll see a wagon roll right through a peasant while on its way to the storehouse. Also, the game has a low frame rate during any action, even on high-end machines. And cutscenes are in-engine, so this issue rears its ugly head even during story sequences. Additionally, the audio to these cutscenes, and to the rest of the game, for that matter, is poor. Furthermore, the voice acting just isn't very good.
There's a patch out already that fixes some issues, but the low frame rate and other bugs mentioned above weren't fixed in it. The single-player experience isn't very rewarding, although the game does let you build your own missions with the editor. You can set victory and losing conditions, and you can even make a sequence of missions in a scenario. Players can also create more-challenging scenarios here, but being able to do so isn't going to make it worthwhile to pick up this game. Meanwhile, multiplayer would have been a more redeeming aspect if it wasn't so prone to dropping players. All things considered, Stronghold 2 has too many problems to be recommendable to even the most diehard strategy fan.
In Stronghold 2, you have a lord who presides over a keep. Peasants will flock to your keep as long as they're kept happy. Happiness is dependent on several factors, including how well they eat, the amount of rats in your castle, and whether you provide entertainment for them. You'll gather various resources to place in your storehouse, and industry workers can take these resources to create advanced items, like bread, ale, and weapons. However, there aren't any complicated manufacturing trees, so don't expect an intricate economic sim game. Stronghold 2 is designed so you can focus on building up your castle and raising an army.
There are a few issues with the gameplay that are worth noting. You can't shut off just one building. You have to either shut down the entire industry or sell the building. For example, if you build three lumber camps but only want two to operate at a given moment, you have to sell the third camp. Also, some of your workers will, on occasion, turn to crime, thus abandoning the industry in which they were working. And, unfortunately, you can't shift a worker from one industry to the abandoned one. This poses a problem when the abandoned post is critical, such as your gong pit. If your gong pit worker leaves his post, and you don't notice, gong will pile up, and your peasants will be unhappy. If you're already on the breaking point of happiness/unhappiness, people will start leaving the castle (and, thus, they'll start to leave other critical industries), putting you in a feedback loop you may never recover from. These are micromanagement issues you shouldn't have to face. More alerts for when critical posts get abandoned would have been a big help.
There are two campaigns in Stronghold 2: peace and war. They're what you'd expect. The peace campaign focuses on economic missions. The king is displeased with his vassals, so you must step up and fix the economy of his nation. You'll focus on collecting a set number of resources in a mission without worry of being sieged. The most fighting you'll see is against bandits or wolves. Since the economic portion of the game is pretty basic, this campaign can be boring if you expect heavy micromanagement. The war campaign, on the other hand, throws you into missions where you not only have to build up your castle, but also attack an enemy or defend your lands. The storyline of the war campaign is weak due to boring cutscenes and poor voice acting, but the missions are structured nicely. Some strategy games can be repetitive because you have to rebuild a base every time you start a new mission. In Stronghold 2, each mission is divided into several submissions played on the same map. As a result, you don't have to rebuild a castle every time you start a new objective.
The two campaigns aren't particularly challenging. The peace campaign can have some tricky situations, but you're not going to burst your brain trying to figure out how to win. The war campaign is a cakewalk, especially once you discover the limitations of the AI. You may have to restart a few missions, but you'll soon realize that the computer follows the same strategy every time. Whether you're defending or attacking, you won't find a worthy opponent in the AI.
When being sieged, it's very easy to adapt your defenses to thwart the attack. Some missions pit you against seemingly impossible odds. The easiest way to defend against these attacks is to build a bunch of wooden walls outside your main stone ones. Ladder men can't scale these walls, and enemy troops will happily hack at the wooden walls while under heavy fire from your archers. Even if the computer has siege equipment, it will be used against your wooden walls instead of your towers or your defenders. Rarely will the computer ever be able to get to your stone walls, much less your lord (if your lord dies, you lose, by the way). When you're on the offensive, the AI won't do much to lift your siege. You can methodically pick off defenders and towers one by one with your siege equipment, all without worry of retaliation. It makes the game really boring and simplistic, which is unfortunate, because there's high potential for great battles.
We wouldn't have had to resort to cheesy tactics if the other castle defenses weren't broken. You can mount logs and rocks on your walls that can be released to cause damage to soldiers underneath. The problem is that once ladder men get close to these walls, these defense mechanisms mysteriously disappear. It's extremely irritating to spend a bunch of gold on these defenses only to have them vanish. Of course, you can exploit this to your own advantage when you're the attacker.
Once you complete the campaigns, which can take around 15 to 20 hours, there's plenty to keep you occupied, if you so desire. You can play a free-build mode, where you just build up your economy and castle with no objectives. Kingmaker is the skirmish mode where you square off against computer or human opponents in multiplayer. Single-player skirmish suffers from the same faults as above, but multiplayer has a lot more to offer in terms of strategy and castle development. Human opponents can use the fairly large number of units and siege weapons to formulate counterstrategies that make gameplay much more rewarding. You can play multiplayer using a LAN or the in-game browser, which is rudimentary but gets the job done. Unfortunately, multiplayer is also buggy, though. In one game, we were suddenly dropped to the main menu. In another game, it appeared that all three of our opponents were dropped without warning. We didn't even notice until it became apparent that one of our siege victims wasn't responding to our attacks.
The biggest change between Stronghold 2 and its predecessor is the addition of a 3D engine. You can zoom in and spin the map around to accurately place walls and structures. However, the 3D engine isn't particularly flattering, because the graphics aren't very good. Aside from the lackluster combat animations, units tend to clump together in combat, making it difficult to control individual units or to even tell what's going on in a fight. Units clip through each other, so you'll see a wagon roll right through a peasant while on its way to the storehouse. Also, the game has a low frame rate during any action, even on high-end machines. And cutscenes are in-engine, so this issue rears its ugly head even during story sequences. Additionally, the audio to these cutscenes, and to the rest of the game, for that matter, is poor. Furthermore, the voice acting just isn't very good.
There's a patch out already that fixes some issues, but the low frame rate and other bugs mentioned above weren't fixed in it. The single-player experience isn't very rewarding, although the game does let you build your own missions with the editor. You can set victory and losing conditions, and you can even make a sequence of missions in a scenario. Players can also create more-challenging scenarios here, but being able to do so isn't going to make it worthwhile to pick up this game. Meanwhile, multiplayer would have been a more redeeming aspect if it wasn't so prone to dropping players. All things considered, Stronghold 2 has too many problems to be recommendable to even the most diehard strategy fan.
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