I expected Gwent with a nice story, not this. The Gwent I knew from Witcher is nothing like this, Battles are very different from W3 and not really enjoyable. And most battles arent even Gwent matches, they are infuriating puzzle battles with very few solutions. The world map itself looks good enough, but its mainly about clicking woodpiles to collect them and then move to the next stupid puzzle battle. Extremely disappointing, if this was steam I would get a refund. First big failure from CDPR.
An absolutely beautiful and interesting game, hidden under inconsistent difficulty and constant loading screens. The story would be interesting, the kingdom management is a bit stressful due to time limits, but otherwise a nice idea. The dealbreaker for me were the loading screens. Lets say a citizen lost his dog and wants you to rescue him. No problem! First lets leave the throneroom - loading screen - cross the capital and leave for the worldmap after 20 seconds - loading screen - start moving to the location, meanwhile a kingdom notification pops up and I enter the kingdom management screen - loading screen - I click 2 things and 10 seconds later I return to the worldmap - loading screen. This continues for the rest of the game, I cant deal with this. Pity.
Truly a masterpiece. A highly polished, refined and challenging dungeon crawling experience.
When I was a little child I always dreamt about building a castle, you know, large walls, towers, waterbridges, all the awesomeness of medieval castles. And Stronghold let's you do all of that. You have some basic economy stuff, building farms, woodcutters, and the castle building. The campaigns might not be that awesome, the real core of the game is the free build. It lets you create huge castles with high walls, hundreds of archers armed with firearrows, raining death on invading enemies. If you just saw King Arthur oder any other random medieval movie , just play this game. It's relaxing, has great music and even the graphics aged very well.
