Stronghold 3 (PC DVD)

I loved Stronghold 1. Stronghold 2 was just as much fun and I really liked Legends.(I'm still to play Crusader)

Stronghold 3 is the worst, most unfinished game I have ever played. I feel like my money has literally been stolen from me. £30 has disappeared and it's like I've received nothing for it. To summarise:

- Troops often don't auto attack, even in aggressive stance. There's more to this though unless specifically told to attack an enemy, they will just stand in place and wait to die. Also this means that once their target is dead they won't automatically attack a different enemy, they will just stand in place aimlessly letting the enemy walk right past to go for the king or a building.

- The zoom function is horrible. Once you zoom out so far the camera starts panning vertically, meaning you have to mess around getting it the right distance away without it going pointlessly and needlessly far and vertically away

- Buildings can now be placed on a 360 degree axis. This in theory is an improvement but it makes the game worse. Instead of spamming the rotate button until your building is pointing in the direction in which you want it to face, now you have to mess around with each building getting it placed perfectly in the exact direction you want it to face. It is slow, tedious and quite annoying.

- The maps are too small or the buildings are too big. You run out of space really fast, and with no grid layout anymore combined with the slow 360 degree building rotation, there is no fast way of placing buildings, just a slow rotation and needless aggravation. This also means you have to take time looking for somewhere to place a building as there is significantly less floor space, and a lot more difficulty in knowing whether a building will actually fit in a certain spot.

- There is no skirmish mode(aka you versus AI opponents on any map in a death match or economic supremacy race etc.) There is an online multi player though I have not tested it out and don't ever intend to with the game like this.

- The graphics are actually much better and there is now day/night and sun/rain which are good improvements though they have gone in totally the wrong direction in terms of game play and this is without doubt the worst Stronghold game that's been made.

- There are no animated cut scenes anymore. All you now get are drawings depicting certain scenes with a voice over to accompany it.

- The Stronghold 3 community forums are already full of people criticizing the game for many more reasons than I have listed here and many are calling for an inevitable patch to come out to fix the problems.

- The popularity system is also quite aggravating. You can fall into negative popularity really quickly. It goes up and down spontaneously depending on various factors meaning it is a lot more difficult to keep track of your rating without constantly viewing it. An example is that if it starts raining, it's -10 for a short period of time. On the other hand if you have no taxes, it's only +5 popularity rating. This is particularly annoying, especially if it starts raining and peasants start to leave your castle.

There are many more bugs that I have not mentioned and many that other people have mentioned on various forums (and when I write this, the game has only been out for 25 hours.) This game should not have been released yet, it is buggy and the overall game play, which cannot be fixed with a patch, has taken a massive step down from Stronghold 1 and 2.

It is like nobody tested the game before release. I have never actually participated in a beta of any game that was worse than this game is on release. Please do not buy this game.

Been a huge fan ever since Stronghold came out.

I waited for 6+ months before buying it and I'm so glad I did. The Bugs in the first 1 were far too many to name or make the game playable really. Once SH3 was installed it took it around 4 hours yes 4 hours to download and install the latest patch. I only download around 350k second. I left it updating while I went shopping. The wait was killing me lol.

Once the updates were done I started to play. I was gob smacked with the GFX. They are sweet they really are. So much better then any of the other SH games.

THe only thing I am really dissappointed in is No Skermish mode. I liked that is SH1 and SH2. I really really hope SH3 in the future will have an update that adds 1. I beat the game in less then 2 weeks. I'm not a fan really of playing this with other online players. But to get the best out of the game and to have a challenge I may have too.

I'm in the process of designing several maps for this so they can be played online.

All in all. This game is good. I would have given 5* but 1 was lost for No Skernish Mode. 1 was lost for the massive download it did for the Patch update.

If this was under £10 it would get 4* maybe a 5*.

Despite a fairly decent amount of hype and a much lauded 'return to basics' approach, Firefly have dismally failed in this appalling game. As one other review commented, it is quite literally the theft of £30. Take Stronghold 1, make shoddy graphics with unresponsive units, a boring campaign and a generally frustrating layout and you've got it.

I have to admit, I haven't even bothered to go past level 2 on the campaign and have already traded this back as it holds absolutely no appeal to me. The first problem I had was the lack of a proper auto-attack function, which is enraging, especially as you have to click EXACTLY on each enemy to make your troops attack it. If you have units nearby, good luck if you want to tell them to attack the baddie... It simply won't happen. Wolves cheerfully run around walls and ladders. Perhaps the most farcical thing was when I build a cow shed, a new cow was born and promptly 'baaa-ed' at me. I mean, seriously, if they can't make a cow saw 'moo' what CAN they do?!

The following part of this review has been found online, but I feel that it addresses many of the key issues:

'combat is unbelievably unbalanced in typical stronghold fasion. Archers on walls or towers gain no advantage, thus rendering the building of defences utterly useless. Wolves can climb ladders, and archers atop towers can be killed by enemy infantry at the bottom. Walls themseleves are hard to place, weak and work poorly in conjuction with other fortifications. Another flaw being the tiny size of maps, which are even smaller than stronghold one, which is just unacceptable considering the size of buildings has increased and the demand for room to support an economy which barely feeds your populace is lacking. Above all there is no combat ai, which while poor in previous stronghold games is completly lacking in this installment. The economy is rediculous, despite filling the incredibly small map with apple orchards players will struggle to mantain a food surplus. The irony of Stronghold 3 is the fact one cannot actually build a decent stronghold, on a rediculously small map and on your increasingly insane quest for food the option of building an actual stronghold, or minor fortification is impossible. Therefore your stronghold is nothing more than an cluster of economic building and hovels (that house less people the futher you move them from the keep) surronded by a weetbix wall that can be overcome by even the weakest units in the game and even wildlife (wolves). In a nutshell there is no gamplay in Stronghold 3, the game is clearly in alpha stage, absolutley riddeled with bugs and almost unplayable. Knocking even the most hardcore stronghold fans off their high horse. One must question as to whether any of the developers actually played the game before release. .' [credit to Wikipedia].

So, in summary, an incredibly poor game that is genuinely offensively bad. If this had come out in 1998 I probably would have been disappointed. Back to Stronghold 2, I suppose...