Fellow kings we have waited years for the next Stronghold installment, and 7sixty and Firefly Studios are heading back to the franchise’s roots with Stronghold 3. After the less than stellar Stronghold 2 the development team knew they needed to dig down and bring gamers the castle building sequel they deserved. For Stronghold 3 they pretty much started from the ground up, rebuilding the parts of the game that were great and revamping the parts that were lackluster. With Stronghold 3 we get a new graphics and lighting engine that includes night-time battles, a new physics engine that makes things like catapulting cows look realistic, and lastly improved online modes and even historically recreated battles. Being a big fan of the series since the first game it was great seeing the series brought back to life.
It’s been a long ten years since Stronghold first made its mark on gaming. The first game was a great addition to the RTS genre. Offering solid economics, fun combat and most importantly the chance to build a castle of your dreams. For those that haven’t played Stronghold 3, you have quite a few options of play. Jump right into the sandbox mode and build your castle of your dreams. Or take on one of the two campaigns, military or economic. Both campaigns are quite challenging, but military is a bit more difficult. In both campaigns the concepts are fairly the same. Build your realm, and attract peasants. Through out the mission you’ll be balancing your resources and need to keep your peasants happy in order to attract more and build your population. One thing that hurt Stronghold 2 is the game became very complex, in Stronghold 3 it’s been simplified quite a bit. As long as you keep a your food stocks up, and keep your wood and stone flowing you’ll have no issues. Also to further expanded your power you’ll need to build honor, but building special buildings and holding banquets. As you gain honor you’ll be able to expand your keep and open up more advanced buildings and units.
Unlike other RTS gameswhere the military campaigns are pretty much flat-out eliminate the enemy, Stronghold takes a different approach. Each mission in the military campaign is special and unique, most of the early missions revolve around you either defending or assaulting castles against the Wolf’s and other’s forces. As you reach the end of the military campaign you’ll be faced with more tasks and will end up having to use all the skills you learned to hold off and eliminate your foe. While I enjoyed both campaigns at times I was stuck on certain missions, mostly the ones that had some sort of time component. I found if you don’t stick to a certain plan you won’t be able to complete the mission. There are some ints at the start of each mission and these at times were very helpful.
Unlike the first game Stronghold 3 plays out in a lovely 3D world. No longer are you stuck looking down at one angle you can fly in and out of the action and spin around to your heart’s content. And while this is great for gamers, its not so good for the game. I say this because the game looks great from a far. The updated textures are rich and the lighting system is great when you have your walls lined with braziers for your archers. But once you get in close this beauty disappears. The textures drop drastically in quality and to make it even worse the towns people running around are just plain simple in design. When you look at similar games like Age of Empires 3, which is old at this point you wonder what went wrong here. However under normal play where you are zoomed out the game doesn’t look all that bad. The new day /night cycle is also pretty neat and acts as a cool fog of war. On these missions it’s key to have proper fires set, or groups on patrol.
Also new to Stronghold 3 is the lack of the dreaded grid building. You can now build in any direction you want by spinning structures to any angle. For the most part the structures seem rather the same. Some structures have been revamped and now hovels vary in size depending on how far from the keep they are. Though it would have been awesome if you could alter all the appearances of the building, or if more than just hovels adjusted based on distance from the keep.
The addition of the Havok physics engine is also new to Stronghold 3. Your castle walls to shatter from catapulted rocks, and bodies to fall and even slide at times, or if you build your defense correctly you can even send large logs rumbling down a hillside taking out lines of enemies. But even with all these bits of gold, the physics still seem out-dated and at times buggy. For instance when rocks are catapulted into walls the animation will show these rocks going through the walls, but then magically bounce backwards and disappear. Again I look at one of my other favorite RTS games Age of Empires 3 where you can unleash cannons on your foes, and you’ll see cannon balls flying all the way through buildings, and even numerous cannon balls rolling around on the land afterwards. If it could be done years ago why aren’t we seeing this type of destruction now? This addition of physics sounded so promising and has great potential, but it’s execution is just off.
I’ve waited a long time for the next Stronghold, and while I did enjoy the game, it’s still very rough around the edges and just not up to par with other current RTS games. You’ll get lots of play out of Stronghold 3 and as the community builds you’ll be able to get user-created maps and scenarios so the playtime is virtually unlimited. Now more than likely a lot of the bugs will be squashed over the next few weeks, but there isn’t much that can be done about the textures. If you liked Stronghold this is a worthy update since catapulting rancid animals is always fun, but if you haven’t played the series you might want to hold off and see how well it gets patched, and from all indications the team is hard at work on rolling out patches, with one already released and the second due out the first week of November.
A copy of Stronghold 3 for PC was provided to us for this review from Firefly Studios.
