Game Over OnlineStronghold Crusader 2
Stronghold Crusader 2 is the latest entry in Firefly Studios’ castle-building RTS franchise, which began way back in 2001 with the original Stronghold. I haven’t played all of the Stronghold games — in fact, I don’t think I’ve played one since 2005’s Stronghold 2 — but from what I can tell, not much has changed. Most of the game mechanics remain the same, but many options have been removed to make the game sleeker and easier to play, which not coincidentally coincides with Firefly’s desire for the game to be more about quick multiplayer skirmishes than long castle defenses.
In Stronghold Crusader 2 like in the other Stronghold games, you have to run a castle. You lord over peasants who perform the necessary jobs, but they’re not just mindless drones. You have to keep them happy by providing them with housing, food, ale, and / or religious services, and the happier you make them, the more you can tax them. Taxes are your main source for gold, which you need for recruiting soldiers to join your army. You also have to quarry stone for castles, wood for buildings, and iron for weapons.
The economic models for the Stronghold games are more complex than you usually see in an RTS, and they involve lots of buildings and moving parts. In Stronghold Crusader 2, there are over 30 types of buildings, from fletchers to dairy farms to churches, and they give you numerous options for how to build your castle. For example, when feeding your people, do you opt for apple orchards which are quick and cheap but inefficient, or do you go for bread which requires wheat farms, mills, and bakeries, and which takes longer to set up? There are also nearly 30 types of military units you can use, from archers to knights to the new “wolf” ballista. Do you go offensive and take the battle to your enemies, or do you sit back and defend? And do you take the time to construct the weapons necessary for your troops, or do you just hire more expensive mercenaries? I always like it when games give me options, and the various Stronghold incarnations have always provided that in spades.
So how does Stronghold Crusader 2 differ from Stronghold Crusader? Mostly it’s in the focus of the game. The original Stronghold Crusader was a slower-paced mostly single-player game where you built and defended castles. There were some castle assaults included, but (in my opinion at least) they didn’t work very well, and they were a rarity. Now in Stronghold Crusader 2, the game is all about multiplayer skirmishes. The pace is much faster, the interface is easier to deal with (in particular it’s now much easier to check and adjust peasant happiness, tax rates, and things of that nature), and there is more of a balance between attacking and defending. In fact, while Stronghold Crusader 2 has a pair of campaigns, they’re “learning campaigns,” and they’re about as fun as they sound. Instead, the bulk of the gameplay is devoted to six “skirmish trails” where you fight 24 skirmish battles against AI players, including longtime opponents the Rat and the Wolf.
Normally when I play games, I focus on story-driven entities like adventures and RPGs, and so I was completely unenthusiastic about Stronghold Crusader 2 after completing its campaigns, which took me only a few hours. But then I tried out the skirmish trails, and surprisingly that changed my opinion a little. The nice thing about the skirmishes is that you almost always start out in a bad position (such as at the bottom of a valley with no resources) against multiple opponents, and so what you have to do right away is build and defend your castle, which makes the skirmishes a little like playing the original Stronghold games. Each skirmish is sort of a puzzle where you have to figure out a building strategy that will allow you to survive and thrive, and I enjoyed that part of the game. The problem is that once you get your castle running, actually defeating your opponents is sort of a tedious grind, especially since the enemy AI isn’t great. Computer players are good about running their economy (and they cheat a lot, which no doubt helps), but they’re hopeless at running their military, frequently attacking you with the same force from the same position over and over again.
The thing that surprised me the most about Stronghold Crusader 2 is how many things got taken out of the game. There are no longer feasts or jousting tournaments, your peasants no longer commit crimes or catch diseases, siege units like laddermen and engineers were removed, European castles only get three types of towers (down from eight), you no longer have to resupply catapults or trebuchets with stone (they get infinite ammunition), you no longer have to expand granaries or the stockpile (they can hold infinite supplies), and more. Usually sequels go in the opposite direction, adding lots of new things, but for some reason Firefly went back to the basics here. Some of the removals make perfect sense, but why would you remove castle and siege options in a game about building and attacking castles? That just seems bizarre.
Stronghold Crusader 2 also has a handful of unfortunate problems, which hopefully will get patched soon. It’s possible to have permanent fires start up in your castle, which can ruin your game if it occurs along a path that your peasants take. You can order your soldiers to attack something, but instead they’ll just attack whatever gets in their way, which is annoying when you’re trying to take down a trebuchet or some other specific unit. If you order your troops to attack-move, then your melee soldiers will do just that but your archers will move until they attack something and then they’ll stop, which makes it difficult to keep your troops together and assault castles. The game can autosave during skirmishes, but for some reason these saves are hidden, and you have to find them and copy them to your saves directory in order to use them (the autosaves also tended to crash my game, but maybe that’s just me). Load times are also unbearably slow, and there isn’t any way to configure the hotkeys.
But overall, even with the problems, I still sorta kinda enjoyed my time with Stronghold Crusader 2. I didn’t like it as much as the original Stronghold, but it has castle building and defending, it’s easy to play (especially if you’ve played any of the other Stronghold games), it looks and sounds fine, and everything works reasonably well. As long as you don’t mind that the game doesn’t really have a campaign and instead relies on skirmishes, then it can provide you with a worthwhile gaming experience. I’d just recommend that you wait for the price to drop down to well under the $50 mark where it is now.
Reviewed By: Steven Carter
Publisher: Firefly Studios
Rating: 72%
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This review is based on a digital copy of Stronghold Crusader 2 for the PC provided by Firefly Studios.
