Stronghold HD

This game, to be short, has dominated my hard drive for around 8 years since its first release in around 2004 or 2005. And I have been playing it ever since. The visuals are impressive, the sound tracks are amazing, the gameplay is awesome! It might look outdated, but after some time of playing you will finally see its inner beauty, it perfectly simulates what a castle should be and it does it very well!

Stronghold is NOT a hardcore medieval city building simulator and if you are expecting that you will be disappointed. Instead it covers the middle ground between SimCity and Age of Empires and does that very well. An average mission is constant balancing between food, people, production, money and defenses. The actual siege warfare suffers from the very weak and exploitable AI (reason for 4 stars instead of 5) but is still way ahead of it's time and surprisingly authentic even by today's standards. I strongly recommend this to all fans of city builder and/or rts games.

A great strategy game. Your tasks will range from managing the economy of your castle to defending it from invaders. The campaign/tutorial works very well in introducing the gameplay mechanisms. While the game is hard, there are a number of ways for it to go south so it never gets frustrating with bottlenecks. It’s more like keeping a train wreck from happening in slow motion. Plus the soundtrack is nice and the graphics are gorgeous in watching a tree rustle with the wind. If there is one thing I hate most though is that the moat digging AI is dumb, which makes offensive mission difficult.

Audio: 4 Design: 3 Gameplay: 4 Graphics: 5 Lasting Appeal: 4 ------------------------- Overall rating: 4

This is a really good game. Graphics are still really nice even though it was released 15 years ago. Music is top notch and you'll find yourself humming along to some of the tunes while you plan your next move. I still love it. It's absolutely worth buying. P.S You can speed up and slow down the game with + / - on the numpad.