Stronghold

Reviewed By: Kirk Hiner

Review Date: July 2, 2002

Genre: Strategy/Sim

Format: CD

Developer: Firefly Studios

Original Publisher: Gathering of developers

Mac Port: Crescent Vision Interactive, LLC

Mac Publisher: MacSoft

Minimum System Requirements: TBD

Network Feature: Yes

Mac OS X Compatible: Carbon

Price: $42.99

Availability: Out now

   

Who sang that song, "War?" You know, the one that goes:

War! Huh! What is it good for?
Absolutely nothin'! Say it again!

Jackie Chan sang it in some movie, but I'm almost positive he didn't write it. Was it Edwin Starr? Regardless, I'm sure many people have answered this question for Edwin (and Jackie), which I'm also sure wasn't Edwin's (or Jackie's) intent. Poor guy(s) probably can't go buy a big bag of Combos at the local Diary Mart without someone saying, "Hey Edwin or Jackie! I know what war's good for! Give me a Combo and I'll tell you!"

So, it's with apologies to Edwin (or Jackie) that I'm going do the same. Here's what I think war's good for: Castles.

Understand first of all that I'm not talking about those wussie Bavarian castles with all the frilly trim and Disney cartoon characters flitting about. I'm not talking about mystical buildings floating on clouds. I'm talking about hulking fortifications of rock in the Welsh countryside. I'm talking about massive structures that were designed to not only protect its inhabitants, but also to make it quite clear to any enemy that this is a kingdom with which one shouldn't trifle...buildings that have stood for centuries and that will still be standing long after our "modern" structures have crumbled to the ground.

Thankfully, the developers of Stronghold feel the same way I do. Stronghold is a castle sim in which players build castles, defend castles, attack castles, and get their inhabitants drunk. Sounds like a pretty good way to pass a century.

Stronghold is basically just a much more focused strategy/sim. As with sims before it, the goal is to expand your civilization while managing military campaigns, trade, population, food supply, etc. The difference here is that the action is centered around life strictly in a medieval castle. Well, once you get to the point where you can build (or conquer) one, anyway. The developers made an important choice here. In real life, castles took a long time to build, of course, and a long time to attack. It wasn't so much about storming the walls as it was trapping the inhabitants inside, cutting off their food supply, weakening them, and then storming the walls.

This isn't so much the case in Stronghold. Castle parts go up in a matter of relative seconds, providing you've stocked up on the proper resources, and attacks happen swiftly and furiously. Sometimes, realism must be expunged in the interests of fun. Another of my favorite castle sims, MacPlay's Castles: Siege and Conquest, required you to design or choose your castle layout, then focus on other things while it was being built. Stronghold wants you to focus solely on the other things; mainly food and taxes.

In order to afford a military and certain supplies, you'll want to tax your civilization as much as possible. Of course, this never goes over well with your citizens, and unhappy citizens will leave the castle. The best way to counter higher taxes is with food. Food actually is the most important resource in the game, which I suppose makes sense. The more food you have, the more people you can feed. The more you can feed, the more you can put to work. The more you put to work, the faster you can achieve your goals, whether they be military or economy based.

Stronghold provides gamers with these two basic play options--combat and economic--which are split into various gaming types. The combat option first offers campaign mode--21 missions that follow your story of conquest against the likes of The Rat, The Snake, The Pig and the Wolf. Pretty much each campaign serves to introduce a new type of building or technology, and many also introduce new characters; warriors, priests, or even entertainers and such. You not only need to know how to utilize them, but also how to prepare them to serve their assigned function.

As long as your popularity rating is above 50 and you have enough houses to accommodate them, citizens will automatically gather at the keep. When you add a building--say, a bakery, cathedral or quarry--a citizen will take that as his profession and go off to work. If you want said citizen to move on to something else, simply shut down production of the building and he'll find work elsewhere. Building production can then be turned back on when you have enough workers or the need for that resource.

Popularity can be affected by more than just food. Certain buildings and structures such as statues, maypoles, gardens and such can make your people happy, which will in turn make them like you. These structures will also make them lazy, however, and decrease their production. On the other hand, stretching racks, burning stakes and chopping blocks never really go over too well, but fear will get people working harder.

This is all well and good early on, but the game gets very difficult very quickly. Managing all of this while being pounding by enemy attacks can prove quite daunting, but Firefly allows you to change the difficulty level as you progress in the game. If one level is proving too difficult, you can restart it on easy mode (or, as Bill Stiteler likes to call it, fun mode). Once you've beaten the troublesome, you can switch back to normal or hard for the next campaign.

Now, if you're not in the mood to conquer all of Europe, you can choose to play in siege mode, attacking or defending a pre-built castle based on those from European history. I found the game's selection of castles to be extremely dissatisfying, however. There aren't many, and those that are included aren't that exciting. This is personal preference, I suppose, but hopefully a future expansion pack may give us more from which choose. Regardless, siege mode involves pure combat, so you don't have to muck about with all that farming and taxing. However, this also means that once a unit is killed, he won't be replaced. Needless to say, the strategy changes here drastically.

If you're looking for a single battle but still want the whole experience of managing the economy as well, you can choose to play an invasion. These are stand-alone fighting missions in which you have to manage your economy while building and defending your castle from various enemies. It's a good place to practice for the campaigns or for the multiplayer component.

Ah, yes. Multiplayer. No point in building a castle if you can't defend against the armies of strangers on the internet. Stronghold's multiplayer component is uninspired, but can still be entertaining. Eight gamers can wage battles over the internet via GameRanger or over a LAN. You can choose to start with an open map or a walled keep. Open maps allow you to build your own castle and forces, while the walled keeps start you off with a good defence already in place. The latter focuses more on siege warfare than the former, which is mainly about launching an assault before your opponent is able to fortify himself.

Within these are varying maps that cater to the style of game you want to play. Some require four or eight players, but the choices are varied enough to keep you entertained if you're playing with fewer. Each variation and map calls for different strategies. King of the Hill, for instance, provides you with a nearly impregnable castle at the start, allowing you to concentrate your forces on the keep in the center of the map which you must conquer and defend the longest in order to win. The Four Castles, on the other hand, requires you to defend not only your castle, but the land around it to protect your industries. Expanding your castle places your warriors in harm's way, so it's also helpful to make allies.

Stronghold offers robust economic campaigns as well. There are only five of them, the goals of which range from acquiring 100 cheese and 12 ale (which, curiously enough, was my goal for my wedding reception) to acquiring 5000 gold (which, curiously enough, is my goal here at Applelinks). You're under no threat of attack during this campaign, but you do still have to defend your peasants from wild animal attacks. The effects of religion, torture and recreational devices, food rations and such factor more heavily here.

As with combat, you're not stuck to the campaign in economics mode; you can play out individual missions. Again, there are only five, but they tend to be larger and more complicated than those in the campaign mode.

And finally, if you don't want to bother with either combat or economics, this game will still manage to appease. In free build mode, you can simply build a castle. No time limits, no resource limits, no guys named after unattractive animals ready to attack...just you, the countryside, and your dream castle. It's this mode in which you can really appreciate the lush sound effects and rich landscapes. The graphics won't floor you with their realism, but they're very colorful and well animated and are nice to look at.

They can be manipulated, too. Stronghold comes with a map editor so you can create your own scenarios for either single or multiplayer games. You can decide the lay of the land, the animals that populate it, and the location of both you and your enemy. Learning how the controls affect the landscape is tricky at first, but it's not too difficult to gain control of it. Well, once you learn the controls, anyway. They're not difficult, I guess, just cumbersome. I never got used to the method for selecting and controlling units, and quite often retreated my soldiers when I meant to just select someone else. You can control the angle at which you view the screen, but not in a way that's quick enough during battle. Right clicking helped, but this only worked in OS 9. In OS X, I had to control-click despite having a multiple button mouse.

But worse, despite everything that Firefly got right with Stronghold, they completely blew it with tone. If you've got a game about conquering castles, why would you destroy the massive, powerful atmosphere with poor attempts at comedy. The opening movie tries desperately to be funny, but fails miserably. So does the rest of the game. The lords you fight in the campaign mode are cartoon characters. They're more like annoying sidekicks of Disney villains than powerful warlords. So much for atmosphere. What's more, they're not even well done. The cut scenes place a static image in the center of the screen, with little faces in the corners. The rest is black. The faces are animated for a couple seconds, but then stop moving well before the characters stop peaking. Were the developers lazy, or were they on too tight a schedule? A game like this doesn't need badly animated characters with annoying accents, it needs powerful, oppressive characters portrayed in sweeping cut scenes on a scale as grand as the castles themselves.

The bad comedy continues, unfortunately. Clicking on characters in the game reveals their function and their name, names such as Peebucket. Was this game written by eight-year-olds? Of course, there's really no reason to click on these characters, anyway. I was under the impression they'd occasionally offer hints or advice, but none of it ever seemed to matter. In every game, I was told by someone that the cows were acting a bit strange, but this never lead to anything. Sometimes the cows would be fine, other times they'd be stricken down with some malady. The cows never seemed to care what the villagers had to say about them.

Oh, and apparently at one point I got married; the villagers all started congratulating me on my marriage. Thanks. With whom did I get married, and how will that alter the game? What was the point? Nobody knows, nobody knows.

So, if you're looking for motivation, if you're looking for a Myth-like sweeping story or cut scenes to keep you playing, forget it. Not only is there little of that here, but what is here is extremely annoying. However, if you're looking strictly for intense medieval combat, Stronghold delivers it in spades, pikes, pitch and boiling oil.

Now, if I could only take some of these weapons to those ridiculous Disney castles. I think it's time we hung that Little Mermaid in the gibbet, don't you?

 

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