A step backwards
There is some story to Stronghold 2, but it's not worth mentioning. Rather I'll talk about the campaigns themselves. Stronghold 2 presents you with two campaigns: Th Path of Peace, and The Path of War. In the peace or economic campaign you'll spend most of your time collecting the various resources and creating the various chains you'll need for whatever excuse the game throws your way. In the military campaign you'll siege castles, build your own, and conquer the maps.
The problem is neither campaign is very good. The game has a bad habit of not teaching you everything you need for even the earliest of missions. In the fourth mission you'll siege a castle and if you do the slightest thing wrong you'll die. The difficulty tends to be ridiculously high, with no payoff in fun.
Part or the failure of the campaigns are the failure of the new mechanics. Alot has changed since the original Stronghold games. Most of the production chains have been enlarged or split up so there are numerous more things you have to do that in the originals could be had rather easily. Other problems such as the new Crime system make very little sense.
Crime doesn't really work as the game is not clear on what causes it. With happiness high, and everyone employed crime still persists. After someone commits a crime, they are taken to the courthouse to be sentenced (if you have one). After sentencing guards drag the man to the myriad of twisted torture devices you have built. Unfortunately you can't choose the punishment. Almost everyone I've ever seen commit a crime gets flogged. Since crime is so rampant maybe I want a public beheading to dissuade the populace against crime? Too bad you can't.
It's no secret that the AI in the Stronghold series has never been brilliant, but in Stronghold 2 it's stupid. In past games you could leave a section of your wall unbuilt and the enemy would rush to it, allowing you to funnel, and crush the enemy force. This tactic also works in Stronghold 2 and I encourage that you use for else the AI is actually dumber.
In Crusader the darn Saracens would sit outside of my walls, long out of range of my archers, firing catapults at me until my wall broke. For that reason i always kept some form of Calvary to sally out if necessary. In Stronghold 2 you don't have to bother as they aren't intelligent enough to do this either way. I could actually detail pages of problems in terms of AI with this game, but rest assured that it's horrendous and that none of these problems were present in the originals.
The military aspect itself is worse as well. For one (and this was a problem in the originals) it's nigh impossible to coordinate a massive attack. I think IGN said it perfectly, some sort of way to plan out an entire attack and then watch it happen would've been perfect. Micromanagement issues aside, the battles aren't very entertaining to watch. While troops march in formation as soon as you give an attack order it all goes to heck. The two forces meet and you'll see what looks like a giant rubber band ball, each rubber band a person. Seriously, it looks terrible.
Is there any thing new that's good? Yeah one thing. You can now hit spacebar to go into a top down, aerial view. This is extremely useful when planning out your castle and eliminates some of the frantic rotating you had to do in the originals.
Graphically the game is a mess. There's not a single good looking thing in it. There is absolutely no art style whatsoever. Everything is blocky, bland, and blurry. I've already mentioned the animation, seriously don't make me talk about it anymore. At launch in 2005 it had performance problems to boot. I would've preferred 2D.
Everything in Sound is just average, except voice-acting which is...there are no words for it. The music is not nearly as good as the original's but at least it's not bad.
Firefly really bombed on this. The story is bad, the sound bad, the graphics bad, the charm gone, the new mechanics are poorly implemented, everything has bee needlessly expanded (newsflash building castles is more fun than building farms got that Firefly), it goes on for forever. It's almost incomprehensible that they could've screwed up the Stronghold series so badly with this release. Maybe they'd be better off avoiding innovation and sticking to what they know works.