Stronghold 3

How the heck do I start this review? Describe the way I feel? I often start reviews with a story in some way relating to the game - or perhaps about the way it makes me feel. Some in-universe paragraph describing the experience of the game as it was to me personally.

I can’t do that, because the game never grabbed me. I was never in the world of Stronghold. I was staring at graphics that’d make a first-year game student wince and fighting an unbalanced system that made me scratch my head at what it was trying to achieve.

The Stronghold series doesn’t have a proud heritage. It started with a great idea relatively well-executed. I know this because not only did I really enjoy the original when it came out, but I actually re-played a few hours of it as a lead-up to Stronghold 3 coming out. After the first game came out, a second, less impressive title was quickly forgotten by most fans.

So really, this is a sort of last attempt to resurrect the series - and boy, does it fail. These games simply seem to get worse and worse.

In Stronghold 3, you plan out a medieval town and construct castle-inspired defences (or even build full castles) to keep your badly-animated townsfolk alive long enough to win the level. There are two sides to Stronghold 3 - the basic idea is to manage an economy of food, luxuries and resources in order to raise armies and smash your enemies into pulp. However, like earlier games in the series, there’s the option of ignoring the smashing-into-pulp component and just focus on the economics system - something to grab the interest of fans of games like Caesar, Pharaoh, or, I suppose, Tropico.

It’s a pity, then, that neither the combat nor the economy actually works well enough for either to be enjoyable. The fighting is hugely simplistic, and moving troops around has you dealing with such difficulties as units moving at different speeds to each other - and not remaining in formation. If you select a large number of men and move them somewhere, you’d best hope there are no enemies at your destination - because your scout troops will get there first and surely die.

There’s no real warnings that anything is happening in-game, either. Once, I failed to notice that a single bear was going on a killing spree in my village until I happened to glance at my status bar and realised that my peasant-counter had dropped from 26 to 14. There was no alert, sound, complaint or symbol on the map to indicate that something like a terrifying bear-related massacre was taking place.

It’s certainly not one-off, either. In the single-player “battle” campaign you often have to move to specific way-points - but when you do so it takes a hugely long time to actually, say, realise you’ve done so and remove the “move here!” icon.

Units magically blip into existence as they walk out of the ‘fog war war zone’, and sometimes appear standing bolt-upright with arms outstretched until you give them your first order.

The balance of the game’s economy seems pretty stilted, too. Like almost everything else in Stronghold 3, it’s not out-right broken so much as just... awkwardly flawed.

You end up spending almost half your peasants on food production jobs just to support a handful of soldiers - and which foods are easy and efficient to create don’t even make sense. I think the general understanding of the medieval ages is peasants eating meat and bread. In this, bread requires three stages (more than any other food source) to produce - a farm, a mill and a bakery. That’s three workers and it doesn’t even produce enough volume to be worth while, really. You’ll probably find yourself feeding your workers almost exclusively apples and cheese.



There’s a sort of luxuries system as a hold-over from earlier games, too. Instead of a hunter producing meat to feed to people, he stores it up and you magically translate it or similar luxuries into “honour” points - required to create military units - by clicking the animation-less “banquet” button.

Another frustrating thing is how flawed the logistics of moving things around your township is. Unlike other, similar games (such as the enjoyable The Settlers 7 or the the last two Tropico games) there’s no role to simply transport goods around to make your stronghold more efficient. You can place your whole three-building production chain for bread right next to each other and then watch with a dejected sigh as the farmer slowly waddles his grain all the way across the map to your single (!) storehouse. Then, the miller will hop to life, making the equally slow trek to collect the grain... instead of having gotten it from next-door in the first place.

Once you have a full economy going, you’ll need to build weapons to arm soldiers with. However, instead of having a sane system of being able to order the number of weapons / armour you require or simply have the game auto-build them based on what units you’re building... they just keep turning them out. Didn’t need all your iron to be turned into swords? Too bad. You need to constantly turn buildings ‘on’ and ‘off’ in order to manage the flow of industry.

The music is hit-and-miss, too. The best tracks are pilfered from the original games, and as much as I love the drinking song that randomly played once (there’s huge gaps between music tracks, which can be confusing) I’m not sure what a medieval stronghold has to do with a turn-of-the-century Irish pub.

The worst thing about Stronghold 3 has to be this - it’s not entirely bad. It’s not the worst game ever made. It’s stable, ran without slowdowns for me and occasionally made me laugh with its Monty Python-esque peasant voices - and I have, in the past, enjoyed games almost as buggy or strangely balanced as this (The Guild 2 springs to mind).

Some people - die-hard fans of the sub-genre spring to mind - might be able to get some entertainment from it, but for me and (probably) most gamers it simply gets bogged down in its hundred and five minor flaws and doesn’t have enough ‘fun’ to make it worthwhile... it dies the death of a thousand tiny paper-cuts.

When you finally click ‘Quit Stronghold 3’ at the main menu, a shocked and hurt voice calls out, “Quit Stronghold 3 Melord!?”

Yes. We quit. Unfortunately.