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Hello everyone! Time for another review. Let me start first by saying,I'm a total FPS guy. I really enjoy playing them. If you asked what myleast favorite genre of game would be, I'd have to say educationalfollowed by RTS. I've never been fond of any RTS game except MilitaryMadness for the ol' Turbo Grafix 16. Anyone here still rememberthat?!?! It seems that I've gotten more than my fair of RTS to reviewlately as well.

So I got Stronghold 2 and decided to take it for a spin. Startedthe game up and was greeted by some very nice eye candy. At this pointI'm hoping that some of this nice graphics work will carry through tothe actually game play.

The main menu opens and there are more than a few options here.Very nice. Not just your typical campaign mode. You can either start anew campaign, learn how to manage castle life or head directly intowar. Any guesses as to what I picked? If your answer was directly in towar, you guessed right. Even after that selection, I still had morechoices. I could choose which scenario I wanted to play on and as wellwhat side, eitehr defending the castle or attacking it. A complaintthat I have about the menu where you can choose what scene to play in,is that they're not rated for difficulty at all. There's no easy,medium and hard. So it leaves one to just pick and hope for the best.Would have been much better to give them a difficulty rating.

So on I went and picked the first scene at the top and chose to be the castle attackers.

I swear the last three RTS games I've played used the exact samecontrols along with the exact same menu layout with of course changingthe icons. That was good and bad. Good because it made playing the gameall the more easier but bad because of the repetitiveness from theother games. Would have been nice to see something more unique.

Sooff I go clicking and moving. Making my army charge and catapults fire.I got totally slaughtered. I tried again and had a little more luck asI took time positioning my men. I tried ever so carefully to inch mycatapults up so they could fire on the brick walls and not takeincoming arrows. Seemed to work here and there, but eventually theystarted to look like pin cushions from the arrow. "Charge!" was mycommand and before long they were slaughtered too.

I switched modes and tried defending my castle. That was a littleeasier at first as my men seemed to grasp that they were under attackand better do something to save their castle and king (ME!). At firstthe storming army was a bit slow and I mowed them down with some nicearchery work. Then they did the same thing I did to them in theprevious battle and charged me. I had tons of fun unleashing therolling logs and making a few medieval pancakes. At the end, theoutcome was the same, I got slaughtered.

The AI was good, almost too good to a point where it made it notfun to play the instant battles. I'm sure if I spent more time learningmore, I could have had more success.

Enough with the instant battles for now. I moved onto the campaign.

This was a breath of fresh air. The first scene all I had to do wasget my two mounted soldiers to a dock area where they took care of therest. Victory! That was easy. On to the next level. Ah, much more to donow. Now I'm playing more of a Sims type game. I had to build storagebuildings, civilian housing, lumber sawing area, stone workingfactories and so on. The difficulty and tempo of that was just right tohelp me get used to playing the game and increase my functionality too.

I went on for a few more levels and found the same thing. Eachlevel brings you to a new difficulty in the right way. It'sprogressive. You're not building a hut in one level and in the nextdefending a multi-teer castle. Now how about some details shall we?

Game Play/Controls:
As I mentioned in my opening, Stronghold 2 has the same type ofcontrols as I used in my last three RTS' that I played. So if you playRTS games a lot, this will be a piece of cake for you and you probablywon't even need to look at the instruction manual.

Asfor the rest of us, it's mainly mouse control. Left click on a unit andthen left click again where you want them to go. There's a little menuconstantly below you where you can order your equipment or men to stop,defend, attack, change their formation and so on. Everything is prettymuch right in front of you at all times. No right clicking to bring upa menu to change things.

Overall, it was pretty easy for me to learn how to play Stronghold2. If you've never played a RTS game, you might want to give theinstructions a once over.

Sound:
Audio is never really big in any RTS game I've played and rightfully so. There's just not a big need for big sound.

The voices did sound like they were from the medieval era and used the same type of wording when they spoke.

There was lots of little background sounds to pick up on. Birdswere chirping, wood cutting, the twang off arrows being fire at you(those damn arrows), castle walls crumbling.

Overall, the sound did a nice job of accenting the game.

Graphics:
Here's where Stronghold 2 lost a point or two. I don't expect anyRTS game to have the blazing graphics of HalfLife 2 or Brothers inArms. But I do expect them to be somewhat detailed.

Good stuff first. The FMV's were nicely done and again help accentthe game overall. You can zoom in and out during your battles orcampaign which is a nice feature. You really can get down and up closeand watch them saw wood or shape boulders into bricks.

Minor things were contained some detail Individual trees moved and could be felled by your peasants.

Ok, now bad stuff. When you do zoom in, everything becomes prettyblocky. Objects start to look flat as well. You're almost better offplaying from a zoomed out distance for better aesthetics’.

There was more than a FEW times where there were glitches andhangs. I'm running this on a pretty decent PC with a pretty decentgraphics card and didn't expect any of this.

A patch was released (which we have in our downloads area), hopefully that will fix some issues.

Overall:
As someone who doesn't care for RTS games, I was pleased. Mainlybecause of the different modes of game play. AI was difficult to playagainst, almost too difficult at times. A difficulty setting would havebeen nice, especially for the instant battle scenarios.

If you like medieval era games and happen to like RTS games, thenStronghold 2 would be a definite buy for you. You'll find hours uponhours of game play in different modes. If you don't like theaforementioned two, I'd suggest renting it first or playing it at afriends house to see if you actually like it before buying it. Overall,it was a fun game to play.