You can't go home again. That's the lesson of Stronghold Crusader
Extreme, a revamping of Firefly Studios' classic 2002 real-time strategy
game Stronghold Crusader.
This minor reimagining of an oldie but goodie is several years late for
the party, a real-time relic based on antiquated game mechanics and
production values. It doesn't even add much in the way of new
old-fashioned game content; it simply goes after hardcore fans of the
original game with a new Extreme Trail mode of play that takes you up a
ladder of impossibly murderous medieval skirmishes.
This is essentially a straight rehashing of the first Stronghold
Crusader. Gameplay shows every bit of its age, so what you've got here
is an old-school RTS game in which you build bases, gather resources,
and grind out soldiers for endless combat. You take on the role of a
medieval lord commanding a settlement in the dusty lands of the
Crusades-era Middle East, and must build it up by constructing the usual
barracks, farms, armories, and mines. Of course, the ultimate purpose
is to use this economic backbone to fund an army of knights, spearmen,
bowmen, and the like, and proceed to wipe your enemies off the map.
The new Extreme Trail campaign is too difficult for its own good.
As with most RTS games from earlier in the decade, the skirmish maps in
the 20-mission Extreme Trail campaign are all about speed, not strategy.
The winner is always the one who can click the quickest, which makes
matches play out more like fast-forwarded street brawls than real
military engagements. This is actually one of the zippiest RTS games of
all time, and spectacularly tough when compared to the nonextreme trail
campaign in the original Stronghold Crusader. The pace has been so amped
up and the maps so packed with enemies that the combat is frenzied and
chaotic.
Expect to be toast early and often if you don't have some heavy playtime
with the first game under your belt. Even with this experience (which
you can gain here because you get the complete original game along with
the supposedly new one), it's amazingly tough to emerge victorious from
even a single one of the scenarios. Multiple enemies target you in all
but the very first campaign mission, and this array of foes kicks off
every match by immediately hurling columns of troops at your puny little
village.
Maps cram all of the factions into such close quarters that it's
impossible to get started on a reasonable army before the onslaught
begins. Enemy armies are typically coming over the hill within no more
than a minute or two from the start of a game. It's hard to figure out
what you're supposed to do to stop these assaults, given that you're
always stuck battling these massive forces with just the handful of
knights and archers that you start with. You have the option of dropping
in companies of spearmen and macemen on the fly at timed intervals, and
can erect walls to somewhat stem the tide, but this seems to only delay
the inevitable as steams of enemy columns constantly rush toward your
keep. All you're ever doing is keeping your head above water, not
building enough strength to take the fight to the enemy.
It feels like you're being asked to jam a square peg into a round hole,
too, because the speedy scenarios don't fit the ponderous underlying
game design. The Stronghold series has always been more of an economic
simulation than a purely military one, considering its strong
city-building flavor. So you can't just whip up barracks and start
mass-producing knights and bowmen. Instead, you have to build mines and
lumberyards to gather the ore and wood needed for weapons, along with
farms to produce the cows needed for leather. Then you have to build
armories, fletchers' huts, and tanneries. After that, you have to make
swords, bows, leather armor, and the like. Finally, you can order troops
into production...if you've got enough manpower by way of your peasant
population. If not, you need to take a moment to toss up some hovels.
After all of this, you can build an army. Or at least you would have
been able to build an army if the bad guys hadn't already burned your
keep to the ground.
Visuals just like 2002 used to make.
Other aspects of the game don't fit with 2008. There is an online
matching service, but it's hosted through the rather clunky GameSpy
Arcade system, and some sort of conflict or bug with our initial install
left us without the icon needed to activate this option on the
multiplayer screen. The isometric visuals of the six-year-old original
haven't been enhanced at all, so you're stuck with pixelated units and a
maximum resolution of 1024x768 that stretches the display to the point
of blurriness on a widescreen monitor. Not that there's much detail here
to blur. Units look like scrambling insects that convulse their way
across the bland, blocky landscape. Audio is just as dated. The music is
a repetitive martial loop, battles are loaded with tinny metal clashes,
and order acknowledgements are repetitive exclamations as bombastic and
dumb as something you might hear during the dinner show at Medieval
Times.
Only someone who has just stepped out of a time machine will have much
patience for Stronghold Crusader Extreme. Aged, formulaic, and
spectacularly difficult, the game isn't remotely appealing to a modern
RTS audience.
Download Here Stronghold Crusader Extreme :
PART 1
PART 2
PART 3
PART 4
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