Stronghold 2 Review

Hold On…

Stronghold like the title suggests, is all about building a castle and a kingdom for your subjects and oiling it regularly. The game starts with what could be the biggest load in gaming history. Even after the initial calibration most games require to optimize it on the systems hardware, consecutive loads too take hellish minutes. The player must focus on building a chain of sustenance which the empire keeps functioning. In a capsulated version of the chaos theory, farmers must gather provisions to feed the population that can then work efficiently which in turn benefits the kingdom. Destroy a grain of rice and watch your armies crumble. The gameplay as depicted above is tight and well thought off.

Get a grip

Unfortunately, when it comes to eye candy, Stronghold is weak. The game’s graphics although average besides taking a long time to load, stutter a lot in game. Well polished gameplay could have even circumvented heady graphics if it wasn’t for the badly diseased graphics. Stronghold 2’s rich background translates itself into a bustling world filled with swaying trees, waves that nourish the screen with beauty and people who walk around idly with knives and swords that cut wind. AI is another grievance that knock nails into your soft brain. Enemy NCP’s walk smack through your castle and the massive doses of lag don’t help either.

War and Peace

Stronghold 2 is divided in to the Peace and Combat campaigns. This translates into the generic defend and attack modes. Peace requires you to defend yourself from invading bastiches intend on violence, destruction and rape. Combat has the more entertaining castle capture, expand territory and kill till kingdom come factor that makes it the winner. Stronghold2 comes loaded with a multiplayer mode and a map editor including a free build mode guaranteed to keep fans of the series happy and sun deprived for hours on end.

Squash them bugs

The game has got most of the goodies in place, except it suffers by being an underdeveloped product. Whether it is the budget or time constraints, Stronghold2 is an incomplete game that will require major patch updates to help it blossom to full potential. Recommended for only serious RTS gamers who don’t mind overlooking its performance shortcomings or if you are willing to wait a while for Firefly Studios to burn away the bugs and plug in all the holes that drain away the mojo from this game.