3.5/5 ★ – Jrdotan's review of Stronghold Crusader.

RTS is a gender that is extremely difficult to pull off, you have to find a nice way to balance units and buildings, to make campaigns or skirmish works, to polish the a.i and in general to make sure you dont overcomplicate or restrict player agency while offering lots of different options for player approach. When a game like stronghold crusader comes, with the promise of mixing a new style of base-building, a veteran would worry and ask themselves if the studio will manage to make it work. So, it works? lets go deeper and see. The visuals in this game are very nice and for the most part, it holds up quite well, sprites are nice, the world is colorful and you can tell which thing is which without being too confused about it, what isnt very good about the visuals is that sometimes, things will get lost behind structures and its a bit difficult to manage units if theres a lot of buildings together as it creates a considerable visual polution. U.I is quite nice and for the most part it has great feedback for each building and easy acess to what each element of the game does, its actually one of the better RTS U.I.s from that time. Sound design is nice, sounds are quite detail and it feels like it makes sense to each structure or unit, wood and stones for example do really work at portraying the heavyness of such materials when you are placing structures made out of those in the map, music is also nice but theres so few of it that you sadly wont be hearing much variation out of this soundtrack and it often gets repetitive after 5 hours playing. The voice acting isnt stellar, in fact its quite cheap, but in this case it works because it doesnt take itself seriously and this renders the game a lot of charm. Another element related to VA and the visuals that gives the game a lot of charm is the animations for the A.I lords which appear from time to time to taunt the player. they talk in very goofy tones such as the pig being pretty much a dumb character that talk in a very sluggish way, those give the A.I lords a bunch of charm. When it comes to story, it barely has much of it, its a historical campaign, basically telling the story of the crusades and how multiple sides of this event interacted with each other, it barely has much characterization and it doesnt lead to anything interesting. the campaign work much more as an tutorial and introduction to game's mechanics, How is the gameplay then? Its mostly based on attrition, the player has to build a castle, generate resources and then make lots of units and attack the enemy lord's castle in order to kill their lord and win the game, atleast when it comes to skirmish, which lets be honest, its truly the game's heart because the campaigns arent much more than a tutorial with lots of different objectives to really make the player used to the gameplay. In general it will seem like its a standard RTS, what makes it different however is that it pretty much gets rid of micro management for units, buildings for example, wont need peasants to build them until they are workable, if you place a building in the scenario, they will automaticallly be completed and the only reason peasants will be needed is because it needs people to be operational as the peasants will actually work on said buildings. Because of that the whole game is much more based on macro-manegement instead of micro Not only this is something that significanly change the flow of the game, but on top of that, the resources in this game are very limited, often skirmish battles will offer one source of stone and this is going to be a point of interest that you and the A.I lord will dispute in order to have an upper hand in the conflict. As a result theres a lot of strategy going on the battle and just direct offensive will not always result on the best of hands like it happens in some games such as AoE 3, not to say there isnt times when this wont happen For once, theres a balance issue with some units being quite broken, assasins for example can very frequently destroy the game with their offensive, a player might just choose to attack an enemy at the very first few seconds of the game by placing a lot of assasins at their bases and then rushing on to their enemies as the assasin unit has the ability to climb castle walls and invade other's bases. Its not going to work always as different lord will operate differently at early game and sometimes you wont have enough money to buy those units This is a thing because assasins are Mercenary tropes, which is a type of unit that can be obtained with money, while the crusade tropes are unit-types you need resources to generate (such as knights,spearman or crossbowman) and between those, the usage of ballistic weapons and engineering or even the more defensive-focused structures, theres a lot of choice and possible approaches for combat and this gives this game a considerable ammount of depth. What isnt very good tho, is the restrictions of the engine, such as the fact that its quite difficult to build your castle correctly without the camera rotation. while you technically have rotation, its extremely unintuitive due to the game being 2d and it mostly makes the game weird, the flatten mechanic (which flatten structures so you can see whats behind them) is more useful, but still doesnt fix a lot of issues with you trying to build things in places that the game simply wont recognize as existing because of weird camera positions On top of that, sometimes you will get irritated by the fact theres no button for splitting units in half when a bunch are selected, you either select one unit in specific or select the quantity you want manually (which is very difficult when you have a bunch of units together) and this also stacks with the fact that sometimes you wont be able to target enemies to attack due to range limitations when you select different unit types together, such as selecting Crossbowmen and slingers, instead of attacking and having the units which can attack, hurting the enemy, the game wont let you attack at all which will become quite infuriating very quickly. Another letdown is that the game lacks an built-in Map editor, which in these kinds of games is pretty much required to make replayability a thing, it was in the first stronghold, but not here for some reason. However, all in all this is still a quite solid RTS and while somethings can be certainly improved, i very easily can recommend this and look forward to the rest of the series. Rank: 7/10