Metacritic stronghold 3 free#
In Stronghold 3, the free build maps are much smaller in comparison with stone walls and the buildings in general taking up large amounts of space preventing the creative building that could have been a great community feature for the game. The original Stronghold had a superb “free build” mode that gave you large maps to create amazing castles with huge armies and economies inside. It’s the game’s limits which also hold Stronghold 3 back from being what it could have been. I often found the only way to hold off the early waves of attacks was to constantly train troops, which train instantly if you have the required resources, requiring you to keep clicking to train more every 10 or so seconds when a new peasant arrives at your castle. Troop recruitment can also feel like this. This forces the player to micromanage troop movements and attacks prevent you from spending your time making sure you have enough food in your granary or enough wood in your store. While travelling to their location, troops will quite happily take whatever missile is thrown at them, without retaliation, until they reach that destination as a result of some very simple AI. While building walls when zoomed out, I sometimes found myself with walls just floating in mid air. Selecting troops and ordering attacks is very hit and miss, with the game often requiring you to zoom right in on the action if you want any form of accuracy with your mouse. If you dont change your tactics to suit the mission, you will not get any further in the game.Ĭontrolling combat in the game can often be clunky and cumbersome. With Stronghold, it is difficult in a way that your tactics are everything and what you decide to build from the start can make or break the entire mission.
Metacritic stronghold 3 series#
To try and give you some scope of the difficulty, I’m used to completing the Total War series of games on the hardest difficulty without having to put much effort in. The game is a constant struggle to the next mission and with no other way to progress through the game, other than completing it one mission at a time, sticking at it and trying again and again is tediously laborious. There is no option to speed up or slow down your peasants and there are no adjustments to the difficulty that the player can make. However, the process in which this is achieved can be painstakingly slow.Įven in the economic campaign, which is supposedly free from the hassles of war, missions where you are suffering waves of attack from bandits or animals from the start manage to prevent you from actually enjoying the missions or completing them in the required time limits. You have to attract workers to your castle through housing, low taxes etc who you can then set to work gathering resources such as wood and food or convert them into troops. Stronghold’s overall goal is to build up a town, defend it from waves of attacks and eventually get up the strength to take the fight to your enemy’s castle. The latter of which tends to detract from the rest of the game and end up feeling like filler in between “proper” missions. With the military campaign you can expect to find missions ranging from defending and storming castles to more simplistic, rather pointless, get from point A to point B without losing all of your soldiers type missions. You have the choice between a military campaign and an economic variant. The main focus of Stronghold 3 is the two campaigns.
While appealing to so many different tastes may sound like a good thing, it turns out that unfortunately Stronghold 3 doesn’t manage to do any of these things particularly well. It’s an economy management sim, a castle building sim, and a medieval RTS strategy game all in one.