| |
Stronghold 2 
Release date: 28 Mar 2005
|
Mygamer review
|
Stronghold 2
When perusing for Stronghold 2 at the local game store, one of the prequels, Stronghold: Crusades was prominently displayed. Large game companies lavished it with praise. Since I’m a sucker for critics (natch), I had high hopes that Stronghold 2 would continue what seems to be a great tradition. Heck, the box cover had peasants being tortured. Nothing wrong with that! Rescuing King or becoming Kings? Right up this reviewer’s ally!
The first thing Stronghold 2 did was patch itself. It’s always disheartening to see a game patched so close to the release date. This usually shows a rushed product, with errors and bugs that could have been spotted with some decent play testing as is the case with Stronghold 2. The patch does not fix a single exploit. Instead, it adds or fixes several smaller items, such as health bars on buildings (can you believe that wasn’t included in the first version?), LAN support for multiplayer, better A.I., and so forth.
Just reading what was fixed in the patch can tell anyone Stronghold 2 was, and still is, incomplete. Nothing is more aggravating than being the first to buy a game and being a mass market beta tester. This is understandable for multiplayer, but for campaign mode, the simple truth is the original version left out many staples of the current RTS generation games.
Worst of all, Stronghold 2 is still far from being completely patched. When placing buildings, they will randomly let you rotate them. Buildings that rotated fine before all of a sudden won’t, and this creates havoc when you’re trying to build inside a tight area. The Torturer frequently won’t do his job, leaving crime unresolved. Other bugs that definitely should have been patched pop up everywhere. A.I. is still a mess; both your soldiers and the enemy soldiers have IQs in the single digits. There are even storyline bugs, which are inexcusable. Need more examples? Even the sounds are glitchy; sometimes the cows will start mooing and Will. Not. Shut. Up.
Speaking of sound, no one should have to listen to these idiots’ drivel. Every peasant is a country bumpkin, and quite a few of the soldier units are too. The rest are snooty aristocrats. Even the main characters’ voices are poorly performed. When you hear Sir William shouting, it’s comedic instead of dramatic. The sounds of castle life are well done, but their volume seems to be louder than everything else in the game, eventually cutting through you like a sword. The sounds of war are barely passable. To truly give an idea for how feeble the war sounds are, understand that the best effects are of a boulder hitting castle walls.
Another problem is the graphical settings. Even with the recommended hardware, the game locks up when set on the recommended graphical settings. This forces a lower setting to play the game. Even with lower settings, the games chugs along. Bad coding also has Stronghold 2 eating up Virtual Memory in about three hours of game time. This is nothing new to people who play mods, but most modders are amateurs who can be excused. This is a professional team expecting you to pay for their work.
The animation for walking and fighting is terrible, as are most 3D RTS’s. However, Firefly Studios has managed to capture the castle life well. Every building interior can be viewed, and you can watch the baker baking bread, or the fletcher making bows. Subtle touches like these are what make building castles worthwhile.
Controls were a bit weird. There is the aforementioned problem with rotating buildings, but selecting troops is also a hassle. When trying to collect all troops by creating a box, sometimes troops will be missed, despite being somewhere close to the middle. Or, included in the patch, you can double click on a unit and select all the similar units around him. This worked so poorly, boxing and selecting them from there was easier. The worst was having a giant erasure to get rid of units. With no pinpoint on the erasure, it was easy to erase something else while going for a smaller building. Only overhead view saved that one from being totally useless.
Not everything is sub-par in Stronghold 2, thankfully. The sieges are magnificent to behold. I have yet to reach the maximum amount of units allowed on a screen, and only the huge drop in FPS keeps me from trying to find it. There have been over three hundred units on the screen at once. Sure, some games have pumped more, but each unit is treated as an individual entity. I’m afraid the game will crash before the limit is found.
In Campaign mode, there are two paths: the path of peace and the path of war. The path of peace is castle building simulation at its peak. Here you learn what it takes to keep a castle running, including getting rid of people’s waste, and scurrying out rats. Fortunately, the small nuances of the population are fun and suck you in quickly. A constant need for money, honor, and keeping the populace happy will have you engrossed into the game. However, the path of peace is only a weekend journey, with no significant bumps along the road. This is a real shame since castle development is almost free of bugs, the least annoying, and most fun.
The Path of War, one that most people will take first, takes about a week to finish, and it takes a bit longer to finish both parts of the branching storyline. The story, about the King’s fall and your push to help him, takes place a few years after the path of peace’s. Firefly assumes you’ve polished off the path of peace and tosses you into the thick of castle maintenance. Here is where you will need to manage both resources and troops. This, supposedly, is the meat of the game.
The difficulty also ramps up in these sections, due to several chapters giving you either limited troops or limited time to build troops. Both add tension to the game, and the later levels are extremely challenging, unless you take advantage of a few bugs in the game. Your troop A.I. is abysmal, but with good micromanagement, you can come out relatively unharmed when laying siege to a castle. However, the computer does not have that option. During the defending portions, a few well placed walls and the computer will mill aimlessly around the bottom, waiting to be filled with arrows.
Multiplayer can, at this moment, be tossed out the window. For some reasons, Stronghold 2 locked up a few times while trying to find a game; it also crashed out during a game. There was considerable lag while playing the few games that bypassed all other errors. With a few small exceptions, the patch seems to have missed multiplayer entirely, leaving it in its chaotic state. If an RTS doesn’t have multiplayer, or at least a decent one, it’s hard to come up with other replayability options. Not that Firefly hasn’t tried, thanks to single player Kingmaker, Siege, and the Free Play modes.
Kingmaker is you against a certain number of computer opponents. Most of the settings can be tweaked one way or another, but it’s still too easy to wash over the computer like a tidal wave. Siege mode lets you pick a historic siege and which side you want to be on. Just like Kingmaker, most of the maps are easy to complete, and there are very few of them. Free Build mode has an embarrassingly few amount of maps to choose from and gets old after one or two tries.
Still, sieges are the prime point of Stronghold 2, and against a human who knows all the tricks and more, there is nothing finer. It didn’t take more than an hour to set up castle life, place defenses, and then get crushed by 200 units. There’s no telling if another patch will fix the multiplayer, but if one does, you can be sure Stronghold 2 will get a lot more play time from me.
In the end, I wanted desperately to like Stronghold 2. It has so much potential. Overseeing castle life is fun, and free building can take away huge chunks of your time. Even the path of war is fun, especially shutting down a siege like you were swatting away flies. Multiplayer has a lot of promise, as well. Stronghold 2 isn’t poorly developed; it’s just a combination of bugs and a bad front end that keep Stronghold 2 from being a must buy title.
Review by Sean McCoy on 9 May 2005
Bookark this reviews at:
|
No reviews yet, be the first to post a review and receive extra credits! |  Members review score: n/a |
|
You need to login to add a review |
|
|
|
 |
|
 |
