Crazy wolves

User Rating: 7 | Stronghold PC

After hard work the lord could finally take a walk on the newly constructed palisade. And it was a joy, because behind the palisade were strange beasts. Many woodcutters did not return from their quick routes into the wood to collect the needed wood for the palisade. About half a dozen bowman were trained in the last days and one of them was running towards the Lord. As he stopped to sentences left his mouth. "Sire the wolfs are lazily laying behind our palisade! Finally we are safe sire!"

The rather easy start in the stronghold universe is one of the swiftest starts in any gaming series. The player starts by setting up a basic camp and afterwards fighting of wild wolfs (which most of the time lay around and do nothing). And this half an hour of the campaign of stronghold perfectly sums up the funny, sometimes ironic general concept of the game. But it gets more complicated than that. After about 8-10 missions most of the game-assets are introduced and the player is fully capable of using all of them. And now each time a new missions starts the player has more stuff to do and more things to look out for as he builds up his economy, sets up his main defenses, trains troops and waits for the first wave of attackers.

The player can build unique castles in every mission and adapted his defenses to each different mission goal. That is accomplished by a huge variety of different siege and battle equipment. And it is safe to say that such a great variety in different assets towers, walls, battlements, siege equipment, gatehouses etc. for your own castle is not present in any other game from that time.

The economy is the other great part of the game that, when all assets are combined, gives a great gaming experience. The economy is quickly erected, understandable and comprehensible, despite of all that still full of detail and strategic depth (giving the player always something to optimize in its setup) and demands a tetris-puzzle like working with the inside of your walls and your castles surroundings.

Certifiable is the rather bad computer controlled player who always walks by the same (studied) route and in my opinion has not understood the battle system quiet well, and the fact that there is nothing to do besides playing the campaign.

As great as this start in this now established Stronghold series was the games that followed were mainly not of the same greatness as the first one even with more content and better graphics often times the "stronghold-feeling" as presented in the first part is not present in the successors. A shame considering the charm of the 2D graphic and the good connection between great variety in defending-assets and the tailor made economy part in the first game

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