That being said, the aesthetics in the game are also pretty good, considering it’s 2014. With mixtures of slow-paced to more intense tracks composed by Robert Euvino, the game certainly picks its moments to turn up the heat when you’re being attacked or building your army. The soundtrack is par none one of the nicest soundtracks I’ve ever heard in an RTS game. Take it from the Sonic franchise there are only so many times we as a consumer base will take the old cash-in for the old time’s sake of nostalgia, and with everything that Stronghold Crusader 2 brings (Because it does eventually shine with a new engine and sound design) it leaves so much behind. After all, Crusader 2 primarily seeks to be a faithful recreation of the original game, I understand it’s not out to impress anyone but that really just doesn’t do any good anymore. I played a bit of Warhammer every now and then but at least Warhammer never gave you the impression it would be about solidifying profound harmony in extra-terrestrial civilisation.Īs much as I want to like Stronghold Crusader 2, if it weren’t 2014 and games like Civilisation: Beyond Earth weren’t constantly going over and setting the boundaries for the RTS genre, I’d probably let this one slide. Call me simplistic, but like I said, I never really did play many Real Time Strategies.

You build, you recruit the peasants in arms and you send wave after wave of them out into oblivion until one of them manages to kill the king unit. And that goes for most of the features in this game, even the experience feels like it was made for you rather than the other way around. It’s another copy + paste in its purest form, and that truly bothers me. You can still place down farms and keep the villagers happy and employed and control the tax rates and all the same things you could do in every other Stronghold game, but it just doesn’t feel like it’s been at all revived and revamped. I know that seems rather daunting to ask considering the word “Crusader” is in the game’s title, I mean, the whole purpose is so you’re ‘crusading’ the lands, that’s what Stronghold Crusader was originally all about.īut you also must remember that it’s still a Stronghold game, a franchise that prided itself on being an authentic castle life simulator, and even though the only interaction your king unit has with his loyal subjects is limited to the odd feast every now and then, ‘it’s still real to me, dammit’. I miss the sim campaigns where the main thing was building and keeping control of your people. As fun as skirmishes can be, not everything has to be sending peasants to their undeniable doom and throwing deceased animals over walls to even out the numbers. I know what you’re thinking, “RTS is more about the gameplay!” As much as I’d like to agree with that statement, we’ve seen fine well that Firefly Studios are fully capable of making an at most intriguing campaign from the original Stronghold games that had branching storylines and characters that actually made you think about the story instead of just being there to fill spaces in the Bot lobby for the only game mode Stronghold Crusader 2 has. … That was quick, right? The point I’m trying to make here is that there is none. Stronghold Crusader II/2/Dos/Du truly left me in shock when I clicked onto the single player menu only to find the entire campaign consists solely of repeating the same skirmish battles on different maps with the same 8 NPC’s with alternating teams. Let’s kick off the review by talking about the story. In a day and age where games like Total War can mix RTS elements from Civilisation and Command and Conquer, you can’t blame me for having high expectations from a studio that created what I consider to be a genre defining franchise in what was a poor and underdeveloped market. However, being a long time Stronghold 2 and HD Fan, I can honestly say I’m disgusted that this is all Firefly Studios could conjure for a 2014 release.

As part of this mysterious course of events, I’ve been playing Stronghold Crusader 2, and while I only played the original Crusader game once, the sequel was enough to tell me that it was a good thing I only played it that one time. It’s getting to that time of the year where the planets are aligning and I’ve been zapped by a mystical lightning bolt that magically gives me the want to play a Real Time Strategy game.

Stronghold 2 game engine