Stronghold Review - PC

Firefly’s castle-building series never played historical authenticity as one of its strong suits. Sure, the games have castle ramparts and archers and men-at-arms, but “simulation” implies fidelity and both Stronghold and Stronghold 2 were pretty loosey-goosey when it came to “simulating” mottes, moats, palisades, and portcullises. Will we ever get the fortress-crafting game we deserve? Who knows, but the problem with Firefly Studios’ latest Stronghold peon-pusher isn’t that it jettisons what little remaining semblance the originals bore to hardcore citadel-erecting, but rather that it’s merely a boring, defective rehash of better, shinier real-time scoot-and-shoots.

Legendarily Lackluster

The Stronghold games have always been glorified RTSs if you think about it. They just emphasize base-pimping in lieu of scrambling around expansive maps to locate resources or bulwark strategic field positions. Think of Stronghold: Legends as a rebalancing act that pares down the castle-fiddling options in trade for broader maps, wider-ranging battles, and a beefcake platter of fantasy units. Yeah, fantasy units. Like witches and dragons and stuff.

That’s the “legends” part, which includes folkloric campaign nods to Britain’s King Arthur, Germany’s Siegfried the dragon-slayer, and the so-called “true” story of Vlad Tepes, i.e. “Vlad the Impaler,” the sadistic Turk who inspired Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Sound cool? It should have been, except that somewhere along the way the development team mistook breadth for depth and ended up with a single so-so campaign and two sorry facsimiles.

The sinker here is that, despite their source material, each of the campaigns couldn’t be duller if they tried. Every mission--and we’re talking dozens--are either “defend against enemy incursions” or “build up your base and attack.” It’s RTS deathmatch, in other words, doing tragic disservice to an otherwise respectable and reasonably sophisticated base system of interdependent war-industries. Sadly doing all the work necessary to gin up a happening little castle-area ends in anti-tactical blob-mash after blob-mash of thronging robotic hack work

Melee battles in general are little more than zero-sum mob charges with ranged units lobbing missiles or magic spells like dutiful little droids. Occasionally you’ll bring in a special unit to throw out lightning zaps or licks of fire, otherwise it’s lasso, point, then wait for last-troop-standing. It’s bad enough at points that you can literally set up “attack trains” of battle fodder until you overwhelm your terminally masochistic computer opponent via one pyrrhic victory after another. It’s as if Firefly got so excited marching us outside the castle they simply forgot to include battle logistics.

More depressing still are the units themselves, so stock-standard homogeneous you’ll be squinting half the time just to make out one from another. They may have menacing names like “white witch” and “hell hounds,” but in the end they’re the same old mounted missile snipers and cavalry riders, stacked alongside a treasury of glorified melee-swingers and missile-slingers. Yeah, you get a few cool units in the third campaign like werewolves you can toss with catapults and vampiric creepers that can climb exteriors quick as Gary Oldman in a wig and dress, but they’re like knocking around quartz rocks in a pile of mud. So much for the box blurb’s “amazing new legendary units.”

That Deja Vu You Do

If you’ve played Stronghold 2, you’ll be right at home with Legends’s base-building framework. In fact it’s really just Stronghold 2’s peacetime mode forklifted in and watered down a bit. Instead of supervising peasants, you lure sundry folk to your castle by keeping your larders stocked and your taxes low and making your castle as palatial as possible. As your popularity climbs, peasants flock to your banner and get their work papers each time you plop down industry, military, town, or food class buildings like armories, churches, breweries, royal kitchens, chicken farms, eel ponds, pitch ditches, and siege camps. Stockpiles still aggregate basic resources like stone, wood, and iron to supply contingent industries, and you can still tweak food rations or the tax rate to boost your popularity and honor (the latter can be spent to purchase troop promotions or mounts for your heroes). All fine, but who wants to play something that came out two years ago, looks about the same as it did then, and wasn’t that hot in the first place?

It gets worse. Everything about the presentation has a rushed, sloppy feel that belies the game’s lengthy development cycle and preexisting source material. Text typos with “put such-and-such help blurb here” crop up where descriptions belong. Special hero-class units lumber sedately toward enemies, raise their swords to swing, then continue walking forward blindly as their fleeter-footed opponents jog obliviously by. Enemies in general often get stuck on bits of foliage like trees, then wobble in place until you waltz over and put them out of their jittery misery. How do you miss this stuff?

The design team must have looked long and hard at the cash-happier mainstream RTS market and decided heading in the direction of a more serious, thoughtful castle-builder was a recipe for low sales. I can think of worse reasons to throw your fortes out the window, and who knows--the idea of combining some light castle-building with a sophisticated tactical system might still have legs. Now we just need someone to make it.

Article by: Matt Peckham
Video produced by: Jess Reed