I don't just give out a perfect score to any game, this game deserves it!
User Rating: 10 | Stronghold PC
This game is very addictive and will keep you entertained for at least 20 hours or more. Everything from the graphics, the units, castlebuilding, and warfare have all been nicely done and put together to make a truly amazing game. If you haven't played this game you should at least try the demo on Gamespot which is only a taste of all you will be getting. Graphics in the game are I admit not the best looking out there but they are good enough. The enviroment is nice and colorful while your town will look nice and friendly (or dark and sinister depending on what you put in it). When buildings and walls are attacked it looks nice and they break apart nicely. The game runs at a steady framerate with almost no slowdowns (except when playing on the internet). Sound is good enough for enjoying the game. Lots of medieval music all which are awesome for the time period. While they do play over and over sometimes while playing a long game you will seriously not notice and be more focused on the game than on the music. The music also changes when you go into a battle. You can also click on units and they will say certain things about your castle like if they are eating well or disappointed over crops failing. Hearing your army units yell "Charge!" or things like "I live to serve you!" are very nicely done even though they may be said at the wrong time. Overall the sound is enough to keep you satisfied. Gameplay is highly addictive and lots of fun. From all the different ways you can build your castle and set up your town the ways you can play are unlimited. It is always nice when you finally build a castle that just looks awesome and everything flows together. Campaign mode is fun and has a big story about how you are trying to get revenge and a person who killed your father. It is a satisifying story where you go through the land and try to get to your main enemy by going through all of his alllies. There are also a general and a monk who help you out during the beginning. There is also an economic campaign where you build a village given a certain task to do like build 30 spears and given a time limit to do it in. There are not many units you can choose to build, probably only 10-15 battle units in all, but it is quite enough and they all have their strengths and weaknesses. You get food by building farms or hunting dear. You can choose from 4 farms producing foods like cheese, apples, and wheat. Along with building an army you can build siege equipment to take on the enemies castles. The gameplay almost never gets boring and if it does you just need to take a little break and come back later. There are also modes where you are defending a castle and a huge army (around 100-300 units) siege your castle. These are a lot of fun to play too. You can also switch over to the attacking side. You can also make new maps for this using map builder. The multiplayer is mostly why I keep on coming back to this game. When you install this game make sure to install gamespy too since you can play online with other people. Fighting the in campaign mode is fine but going at it with a real person, who can actually think, is awesome and a lot more fun. You can play each other on a map that has already been created or you can build your own map and fight them on your own terrain. The map builder lets you use anything from the game. You can build your own terrain and place where all the keeps will go and where they resources will go. Sometimes you can get a really fun one that you can just play over and over. There are thousands of different maps you can create. Overall this game is a lot of fun to play and you should really try it. That is why I give this game a perfect score. It is also at a cheap price now too. You can probably get it for 10 to 20 dollars. You should go and buy it now. Don't buy Stonghold 2 though. The original is more fun and Stronghold 2 flopped because they just complicated everything and tried to make everything look more real which didn't work so well. So get the original Stronghold, it is worth it.
