Over Thanksgiving, I purchased Stronghold 2 for $19.99 from Office Max. I was in the mood for a real-time strategy game, something a little different than my usual sci-fi fare. Stronghold 2 certainly seemed to fit that bill. It featured medieval castles, catapults, trebuchets, archers, polemen, etc.

The graphics in the game are 3D and more than adequate to the task. It was very easy to tell units apart on-screen, buildings looked unique and recognizable, etc. Rotating the camera in the game proved to be rather difficult, so I rarely tried. It just wasn't worth the effort.

The sounds are also adequate and not overdone.

The controls are a bit strange. To select a unit, you left-click on it. To move it, you left-click where you want that unit to go. Most of the time, this works fine. Sometimes, however, this makes it difficult to select and move units that are located close together.

There appears to be a "tech tree" of sorts in the game, where you can initially make only spearmen and archers. Supposedly you can also make armored troops, swordsmen, and a variety of others. Unfortunately the manual doesn't explain this well and it's certainly not clear in playing. After playing several levels of the single-player campaign, I still can't make a mounted unit or a sword-swinging unit. I've no idea why or how. Worse, my AI opponents all seem to be able to produce these units in quantity, and their units seem to take 2-3x the damage mine do before dying.

In addition to the "invisible" tech tree, the game also suffers from a "wash, rinse, and repeat" mission design. That is, at the start of each mission, you begin with almost nothing. You have to scramble to gather resources, build defenses, and construct units to defend and/or attack. Meanwhile, the computer throws wolves (which eat archers and spearmen for breakfast), bandits (who can kill several of your units with one of theirs), enemy forces (which can kill several of your soldiers with one of theirs), time limits, and more at you. Once you've managed to beat the level, the cut scene explains that you've decided to move to another castle for the next mission (i.e., rinse away all your progress) where you start all over again (i.e., repeat).

Sometimes, the cut scenes make some very lame excuses for the "rinse" part. For example, after fighting my way through one map, my "character" and another decide that they need to use their enemy's castle because it's better located and will be easier to defend. Below is the castle they think will be easier to defend:

Here's the castle I was operating from when this great military decision was made:



You tell me... which of these two castles looks like you have a better chance defending against a military force you're told is about six times the size of yours? The castle with no walls, no weapons factories, no worker residences, and no food sources or the castle which is generating tons of money, making its peasants happy, generating lots of weapons, is surrounded by walls, and which has already survived several attempted attacks?

Even more frustrating with this particular mission is that you have NO Way to generate stone or wood resources from your "new" castle and you have NO access to the abundant resources that your previous castle was generating. If you're lucky, you'll get an initial stone wall up before the enemies roaming bands of knights arrive. If not, those knights will singlehandedly eliminate every military unit you have and destroy most of your buildings. They will also hang around, which prevents you from being able to build the necessary defenses (due the fact that the game won't allow you to build any defenses if your territory contains even one enemy unit).

When you DO get the wall in place and defend against the enemy knights, you can only watch helplessly while they cut down all the supply vehicles bringing food, wood, stone, metal, etc., into the castle.

Eventually, the enemy does show up and lets loose with about 5-10x the troops you have. Those troops are also "amped up" by the game designers so that one of them can kill about 10 of yours. In addition, they're armed with trebuchets that make quick work of your stone walls. You'll find that you're overrun pretty much in seconds.

Most of the missions are this way. The enemy vastly outnumbers you, overpowers you, and has better technology. If you're good, you can make the economy take off quickly and build up a force that will help you defend your castle and win. But each mission makes that economic ramp-up more difficult and the odds against you even worse.

To be honest, I haven't finished the game. I play for a while, get frustrated with the repetitive mission design, the inability to figure out how to make certain units, and constant attacks by an enemy that outnumbers and vastly outguns me, then I quit. In the early levels, it was like solving a military "puzzle". Now, I just feel like the mission designers went out of their way to load the game with ridiculous artificial constraints that make it difficult to enjoy.

On a scale of 1-10, I'm still going to give Stronghold 2 a 7. The game was relatively crash-free, stable, quick, and worked well. The graphics, sound, and controls were decent but not spectacular. The mission design, however, is very redundant and repetitive. It gets old and frustrating quickly.

Stronghold 2 is published by Firefly and 2K Games, is rated T for Teen, and you should be able to pick it up for $20 or less at a local store or online.

If you like an extreme strategy challenge, you may want to click this link and pick up the game from Amazon.com for around $14-15 plus shipping.