Stronghold 2

I won’t call Stronghold-2 any usual strategy game; rather I’ll call the game; a series of events which will test your strategic and managerial skills in a continuous process. Stronghold2 comes up with a superior variety of features for building castle, managing the province and the features of building different types of troops. So, the travel through the game is challenging and some of them are really difficult to pull off.

The game is cleverly divided into two different paths of gameplay. The peaceful-modes include free-build and a fully developed campaign based around construction, while the war-modes include a skirmish-style Kingmaker mode, real-world sieges to fight, and a full story-lead campaign centered on combat.

The real fun is based on the construction of the city and the running of the settlement, with the war as a second awareness. Stronghold-2 isn’t a city building simulation, so it’s very difficult to take the city’s economy to a stable stage while you constantly have to think of saving your lands from intruders. Unless a stable economy you won’t be able to build up your castle defense system and also a large amount of troops. In this case, the worst thing you’ll feel about the game that the production rate’s very slow and on the other hand; consuming rate’s faster. When you’ll be playing the campaign games you’ll be given specific time limits most of the times, and there’ll be attacks (continuous sometime) or festivals which need to be attended within that time limits. So, sometime to face the consequences you end up building your whole economy system and suddenly you realize that you can’t handle the situation any more. At this point, whether you’ll restart the game or simply give up being bored.

For me, I restarted the game and actually tried to learn it. And once you learn the game, you just need to follow a strategic process for building the city, run the necessary production and manage the defense. You can think of attacking instead of defending and waiting to finish the game, but it’s the campaign which will tell you what to do or what not. You’ll learn that in course of your gameplay. Comparing to other strategy games, this scenarios may not look like a real time strategy games; as there aren’t too many varieties for managing the city, but when it comes to castle building; you can actually have all the varieties you can think of. There’s nothing absent in terms of castle building in this game, which are truly flexible to use in the game.

But, no game’s perfect and nor Stronghold-2. One of the major problems you face in the game is known as ‘gong’. Once you start building a settlement, you’ll get familiar with this word. The more gongs your city produce the more problem you have controlling the places it’s pilling up. People usually prefer living at the place which are clean and gongs on the other hand makes the place dirty and smelly. Well, the longer you play the game; you’ll know how to keep that air in control. Another problem occurs when you try to build your castle boundaries. Sometime because of the stone supply or the natural reason, there will be gaps between walls or towers. You usually build up your defense system based on the paths your enemy can possibly attack, but when there’s a gap; the enemy heads straight to that side, even if that takes them to circle the whole glob. There’s another issue will really bother you at the war time. When the enemy is closer to your walls or area, you won’t be able to build anything. But this doesn’t happen to them. Sometime when you’re done killing the entire enemy and rocking their castle to sedge, you’ll definitely say that, didn’t I just smash this building few seconds ago? No matter how closer you are, unless you smash the main castle, they keep on building the structures. It’s really irritating sometime.

Well, there are ups and downs in this game but one thing for sure that you’ll love playing it, if you’re a medieval battle fan.