Stronghold 2 does not follow the standard recipe of other games in the strategy genre, instead it walks away from the standards and dares to create something unique. The single player campaign is split in two parts, peace and combat. In the peace campaign you have to build your stronghold from the ground up, while keeping your citizens happy. You have to deal with crime, rats, fires, and many other things, because if you don't, citizens will leave your stronghold. Likewise, if you keep them happy, more people will join you. There are plenty of buildings to choose from when building your city. Each of them have a different effect on your citizens. The combat campaign consists of both building up your stronghold, creating military units and attacking your enemy. A storymode is present in this campaign which introduces several characters. It has an on-going story, which makes it more interesting. The combat part in Stronghold 2 is very different from what you see in regular strategy games, it focuses more on strategy instead of creating the biggest amount of troops to win the game. It is really cool to see your balistas smash a hole in your enemy's wall (especially because the walls have real-time physics!), or setting his buildings on fire. You can choose from a huge amount of tactics both when defending and attacking in this game, and you have a big variety of units to choose from. You can also place a lot of cool defensive buildings and traps for your enemy to fall into. Stronghold 2 is packed with the best graphics of the genre. The textures and models look great. All the buildings and units have bump-mapping, which adds a lot of detail to them. Many shaders are present in the game, which makes the water in particular look great. The biggest thing when it comes to the graphic are the animations. The models walk incredible realistic as you can literaly see them take every footstep. The amount of animations each model perform is high, as you can see them in detail doing a lot of different things. The sound in the game is also nice. You can click on different peasants and hear them talk about their current mood. During the game a royal advisor will also tell you how your kingdom is doing. In the single player campaign there is also a lot of dialogue between the different characterss. Listening to old fashioned English being spoken is quite different and amusing. The music also adds a nice touch to the game and is relaxing. This game is a must get. It adds a refreshing and new style to the old and overused standard strategy games out on the market. The game also comes with a map editor, so you can create your own maps to play with in single or multiplayer. The only negative I have to say about it is that there are a few clipping errors (units walking through walls), and the multiplayer part of the game is not enjoyable because it has too few options and some rather nasty bugs (the game crashes back to the main menu after playing it for a certain time). While this might ruin your multiplayer experience (until the developers decides to fix the crashes), you are sure to have a lot of fun with this game in single player.
I have been playing Stronghold and Stronghold Crusader since they came out all those years ago and I loved them. So it was with great anticipation that I picked up a copy of the new version, installed it and sat back ... Read Full Review
Stronghold 2: Man the parapets If you’re not of the age to remember when living in a castle was the day to day business, then Stronghold 2, from firefly studios, will be the closest thing you can get to without litera... Read Full Review
