Stronghold Legends - PC DVD ROM

An Englishman’s home is his castle or so they say, but if that were true then the next door neighbours would be building themselves some trebuchets with which to knock a small planet sized hole in your conservatory, whilst you would be preparing the boiling oil with which to repel unwanted sales reps.

The original Stronghold allowed players to live out their medieval architectural dreams by building an unassailable castle, building an army, and then setting about demolishing the oppositions as ruthlessly and as efficiently as possible. The emphasis was on the building of the castle, whilst the managing of the military engagements and economic headaches proved to be rather fiddly. The original Stronghold kind of did what it said on “ye olde tin”.

Stronghold Legends on the other hand, doesn’t, and I’ll explain why a bit later. You as the player are represented by a hero from three “unique” races. You can either be King Arthur, Count Vlad Dracul, or Siegfried of Germany, and each of these races has their own stock of specialist troops and abilities, as well as different Castle features, and additional minor heroes. So what you have now is a mix of castle building, economic management, military management and hero management. Sounds a bit awkward? That’s because it is.

A typical game runs something like this. You build houses to get more peasants, then you realize you need more food and wood. People start leaving because then you notice that you forgot to turn the tax levels down a bit, so your attention turns to that, just as your food stocks run low. It then occurs to you that you really should start building walls to protect yourself (that’s the aim of the game right?), and then start acquiring military units to defend those walls from enemy marauders. Just as you’ve managed to erect one gate house and approximately 6 ft of wall, along comes the enemy with a whole stack of “unique” units who then unceremoniously bulldoze everything you own into oblivion within 60 seconds. Should you be lucky enough to have actually built a wall enclosing your people, the enemy still come along, and have units that entirely bypass your defense, such as dragons who just flyover head and burn everything to the ground, or “Vampiric Creepers” who can climb walls faster then Spiderman on 2 litres of Red Bull. The end result is a rather annoyed glare at the screen which portrays a scene of devastation, and the silence only broken by the ever so peeved drumming of fingers on the desk.

It’s at this point you see the flaw. Stronghold has shifted from castle building to RTS mode, and it’s when you realize that you don’t bother building a castle, putting your resources into building an army, and launching an all out assault at the earliest opportunity to wipe out the enemy, that your chances improve. In short, I switched into “Age Of Empires” mode and did a lot better. You could argue that Age of Empires never really made a feature of castle siege warfare, and you’d be right….but honestly, Medieval Total War 2 does a much better job.

Stronghold Legends is by no means a bad game, it’s just that it isn’t great either. The graphics certainly look prettier compared to earlier versions of the game, but when you take a look at other RTS games out there, this game really doesn’t stand out. We have the obligatory voice acting which seems a little out of place but does the job, and then the gameplay, which in fairness isn’t that bad given how much you control. But that’s another problem, there really is too much to control, and it seems the efficient professional army that you raise really are dehydrated rock stupid and constantly need your attention.