love castles, love medieval warfare well this is a game for you!
Stronghold 2 builds upon stronghold 1 and makes it so much better. To start with there is a hell of a lot of new stuff ranging from gong farms to berserkers. There must be about 60% more stuff at the least added into this game along with many of the originals buildings and all of the soldiers and trap from the original. The war campaign and peace campaign will last you at least 20 hours each and they are great fun and highly addictive. To add to this there are is a great array of historicaly accurate castle sieges to play, which is great fun and looks really good with the new 3d graphics which are by far better than its predecessors but still keep it in the same style. There is a great scenario editor which is great fun to use. There is a free build mode which is great, where you can build your perfect castle and if you want to you can test your creation against a large amount of different size forces which is very fun and it is very satisfying to watch as your enemies die miserably. This game has so much to do it could keep you entertained for waeks on end if you like the game play.
The game play is great in this game. It is very fun to watch life in the old castle, everything from watching your peasants struggling with their daily lives to your lady enjoying feast and banquets with her lord. The fighting in this game is good as well although I wouldn't say is was amazing. There is a huge amount of troops to choose from including all the ones from the original and the best from crusader. There are many new additions from peasants to pictish boat warriors. There are many new castle defences including burning logs and stone tippers. In the game units do clump tgether however in combate which can look a bit ugly and can make it hard to see who is winning but it does stop units getting stuck. When i got the game on lauch day there was a lot of bugs however if you have the internet this will not be a problem as firefly have released a huge amount of patches that fix all the buggs and know this game run very well.
Online play is very fun and adds alot to life span even though the single player game is huge. Sometimes during internet games it does go back to main menu or has an error but this is very infrequent and it doesn't damage the online experiance.
This game is hugly addictive and i would recomend it to anyone who enjoyed stronghold 1 or crusader or to anyone who loves casles or medieval warfare or both.
Dan.