Reviewed: June 5, 2005
Reviewed by: Jason Porter
Publisher
2K Games
Developer
Firefly Studios
Released: : April 19, 2005
Genre: RTS
Players: 1-2
ESRB: Teen
6
8
6
8
7.0
System Requirements:
System Requirements:
Screenshots (Click Image for Gallery)
There are sim games, and there are real-time strategy games. There are castles, and there are computers. My point is that some things just don't mix all that well. Stronghold 2 is the sequel to Firefly Studios' modest success, Stronghold. Gone are the isometric graphics. Here instead is a very nice 3D engine. Added to the mix are a plethora of new units, new structures, new siege equipment, and more. However, the core gameplay seems to have remained stuck, as it were, in the days before electricity. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing.
The main points of emphasis in Stronghold 2 are, of course, its castle building and management aspects. Firefly has created a large number of options for role-playing the lord of a castle. All the modes of play are divided into two groups; the Path of Peace and the Path of War. Those who choose Peace will be presented with combat-light options that focus more on resource management and castle growth than commanding and conquering.
The Path of War modes tend to focus more on combat and fortification than jousting and farming. The best first step is to follow the generic but still somewhat entertaining story of medieval intrigue and destiny written for the game in its story mode, which leads players through a dozen or so missions with varying goals.
About half the missions are battles, while the other half involve building new and necessary structures for the upkeep of your sanctuary. All of the buildable structure and unit buttons display the standard name, quick description and ability cost when hovered over, and there's a very, very helpful tutorial feature between each mission explaining the new stuff you will encounter in the next one.
As for those other modes, aside from Campaign there are Kingmaker, Custom (for your created maps) and Online gaming options if you follow the Path of War. Kingmaker places you in a preset campaign in any of a number of historical and/or more fantastic settings (castle warfare set in Australia, anyone?) in a battle royale with several other kingdoms for control of the land.
The AI in this mode isn't too bad, but your enemies will generally fight according to the same pattern (siege equipment followed by large numbers of soldiers), making defense a matter of memory after a while. Online gaming is fairly self-explanatory, with players linking up with up to seven real-life players in a game similar to Kingmaker mode, but with the added challenge of clever enemies. The online community is fairly small as of yet, but it shouldn't be hard to find an open game for those interested.
Walking the Path of Peace will put you in command of one of three options as well. Sim Campaign is similar to Campaign mode, but without most of the fighting and battle objectives, instead focusing more on building your castle's economy and punishing peasants. ("Much to the amusement of the public," asserts the instruction manual of one form of public humiliation. Ugh, peasants.) In Free Build mode, perhaps the most enjoyable mode overall, you're let loose with no objectives, time limits or enemies to speak of and allowed to place laborers and build your castle over time as you see fit.
Unfortunately, this mode is also the biggest showcase of one of Stronghold 2's main weaknesses: the pacing. It takes several minutes of slow-motion sawing and cart-pulling before your woodcutters bring any wood to your supply depot; it's the same with all the raw materials. Instead of just accelerating things up to the speed of a few seconds' animation and then adding a pause button, like most sim games, Stronghold 2 sees fit to make a point of just how long it really took to gather supplies in Ye Olde Days. As you watch the months pass on your in-game time keeper, you'll begin to wonder if it really took dozens of peasants working 'round the clock for a year just to get enough wood together to build a single small bridge.
In fact, one of the main overall troubles with Stronghold 2 is that it bogs down in micromanagement too often for any but the most dedicated player. While the Story mode is fairly light on drudgery, the game grinds to a halt when it comes to designing your own castle without resource restraints, which for me could have easily been the most entertaining part of it. In the Map Editor (i.e., castle creator) mode, every military unit, civilian and military improvement and type of siege weapon is at your disposal, from simple wooden ramparts to nigh-impenetrable towers with yard-thick stone walls and crenellated battlements.
Unfortunately, the quick descriptions and unit costs that display on hover in other modes are strangely absent here, leaving players to wonder haplessly which miniscule wooden structure is an ox tether and which is the gallows. It also gets ridiculous when, near the end of creating your masterpiece, you're forced to go back through and place every single unit, every single torch and every single basket of rocks for throwing by hand around the castle ramparts.
Perhaps the most annoying aspect is having to place special stair towers at regular intervals around the inside of your castle's walls in order to allow troops to get up to the top of them - I know it isn't quite as historically accurate, but wouldn't it have been easier to just implement an auto-place function for these things? Worst of all, when placing these towers, if they're even halfway inside the wall (which makes sense, since it's a tower built to get to the top of it), they delete the entire segment of wall they were supposed to augment. Half the time, even trying to place new connecting wall left me frustrated, as the new wall matter-of-factly deleted the old wall I was trying to connect it with, forcing me to lay out the entire castle wall structure all over again.
Stronghold 2 presents a fairly standard battle engine, from an RTS perspective. Units can be selected singly or in groups (by dragging a box around the units you want to command). Then, depending on the unit, a number of options become available. The simplest thing to do is select a group, click on an enemy and watch them have at it. There are also some basic formations available, with are useful in pitched battles even if they lend some troops an air of more discipline than they probably would really have had in the eleventh century. Special units also have their own options; for example, archers can perform ranged attacks. Despite the mediocre enemy AI, battles can be overwhelming at first due to a number of things.
First off, the camera controls in Stronghold 2 are just awful, forcing players to click buttons to change views rather than allowing fully free camera motion with the mouse. The mouse can move the camera left or right, and zoom it in or out (though not far out enough for my taste), but if you want to move the camera up or down, you're out of luck with it. In the heat of battle, it would have been nice to see what my troops just behind the walls were doing with a flick of the mouse wheel.
Secondly, the computer is always more organized than you are, able to do several things simultaneously as you rush all over the map with your annoying camera trying to match it move for move. Lastly, your castle's defenders are usually vastly outnumbered by the invasion force, making each unit that much more precious and making it that much harder to stop, for example, three dozen soldiers simultaneously placing ladders all over your castle walls.
As a side note, I could never figure out how to push the ladders down, either, which didn't help. Of course, except for not pushing the ladders down, this last point is more of a historical truth than bad design (castles can only hold so many people; siege armies were as big as they wanted to get). But it didn't exactly help my opinion of the game.
Stronghold 2 has some very impressive graphics - if you've got a 2 GHz processor, 512 Mb of RAM and a 64 Mb graphics card. Anything less and the game begins to lag, even on "recommended" graphics settings. At highest quality, character models are amazingly detailed, right down to the point where it wouldn't be hard to imagine them having facial expressions. The bits of CG movie in the game are very nicely done, too, and look about as close to lifelike as I'm comfortable with. The only thing somewhat lacking is the lighting, which is uniformly soft and sourceless most of the time. It would have been nice to see the game mix it up with a little real-time weather at least.
On the other hand, though the graphics are of very high quality, the characters themselves aren't particularly memorable from a visual standpoint (or a plot standpoint, for that matter - but I digress). This is a game that necessarily features scads of stock Renaissance Faire types: rugged manly men with strong jaws, conniving tricksters with curly moustaches and so on. I say necessarily because, as part of Stronghold 2 is a simulator, it was important to create characters generic-looking enough to seem more abstract than concrete. If the Lord (the leader of your armies in the game) were designed with the care of a Final Fantasy character, for example, people (myself included) would have expected alternate designs as well. That gets into the realm of character creation, and even a game this muddled in micromanagement knows when too much is too much.
Depending on your point of view, this uninspired design could be a bad thing or a good, but in the end there's no denying the raw quality of the graphics Stronghold 2 has to offer. On one hand, the effort is to be lauded. On the other, some things the game needs to do get very difficult as the graphical quality is stepped up. For example, putting sixty units on screen at once and rendering them all in the highest quality looks impressive, until it begins to lag so badly that you're forced to reset at a lower setting. The computer I played this game on is pretty new, with a 2.1 GHz processor and a decent video card, and even I found myself switching to the "Low" quality setting just so that the game didn't slow down so much. In a year or two, these graphics will be old hat, sure. But for now, they take a top of the line machine to really enjoy. Just bear that in mind.
Stronghold 2 features a lot of pleasant, unobtrusive medieval-type music, with flutes a-playing and lutes a-twanging - you know, minstrel music. It's well done, and though it's hardly original, it really shouldn't be for a game that is set in 1066 AD (the year of William the Conqueror's conquest of England, for those of you not in the know). There's nothing really memorable in the canon, but it's nice music. It serves as a good backdrop for taking care of the menial tasks that occupy much of your time in the game.
The voice acting is flat average, which is okay I guess. I've never been one to pick out an accent, but the Queen's English that the characters speak here seems a bit... wavery, or at least stilted. The dialogue was written well enough, along much the same lines as a forgettable historical movie. And as for sound effects, they all seem stock, though I must admit the number of sounds happening at once during a battle is somewhat impressive.
Overall, there isn't anything not to like about Stronghold 2's sound package. However, that hardly means it's great by any standard. It's just kind of there, and obviously something of an afterthought to the game's designers.
Stronghold 2 has as much value as you're willing to put into it, plain and simple. Those of you who can see past some of the boring aspects of it, and are willing to endure the annoying camera controls and at times incongruous menu displays (some modes show menu info, others don't), should find the game well to their liking. And buffs of the early High Middle Ages should certainly have a blast with it.
This game is targeted at a specific audience, and that audience - castle buffs, military reenactors, and medieval social-history enthusiasts - will find that it offers them nigh-endless replay value. The rest of the general gaming public should just be aware that it takes patience; perseverance and a willingness to tolerate some periods of boredom as you simply sit and watch your little peasants go about their business for months upon months.
Stronghold 2 is one of those games that doesn't have mass appeal, and doesn't want to. While that's fine, even niche games strive to be fun to play. Firefly Studios can't seem to quite figure out where to draw the line between realism and fantasy, which translates to a game that can't draw a line between boredom and entertainment. It isn't a bad game - not by a long stretch. But even the prettiest graphics in the world can't make this game very addictive.
Those of you who think that the game is for you already will not be disappointed. Those of you who aren't sure should probably at least give it some time to come down in price before taking a gamble with such an involved title. In the end, Stronghold 2 tries to do just a bit too much and ends up not really excelling at anything.