#Stronghold crusader 2 reviews full
#Stronghold crusader 2 reviews Pc
#Stronghold crusader 2 reviews plus

After watching the victorious battles, we were curious about how far along unit balancing is at this early stage of development. In another battle, we saw a whirling dervish character take out roughly eight soldiers with a single special attack that spun the attacker in circles, dicing the defending soldiers down. The attacking archers wiped out the defending soldiers, even with an extreme disadvantage of being on the ground and unprotected from castle walls. During our demo, we saw four archers in a wheeled transport take on four similar archers perched atop a castle wall. In an RTS, however, balance is crucial to the core experience of the game. The sim element supports that, but it's really about the RTS, the fighting, and lots of players on the map.' 'The Stronghold games are heavy on the sim aspect, whereas Crusader is more focused on the RTS and skirmish gameplay. When asked where the true focus of the game lies, whether simulation or RTS, Harris was quick to answer. If development is spread too thin between the two focal points of the game, there's a strong chance of delivering two 'half-baked' divisions of a game. The game does represent a curious blend of RTS and castle sim, and Firefly surely knows better than anyone that it's a risky business to play both sides, especially with the title being backed primarily through crowdfunding. And the UI has been updated to reveal more of the battlefield if the player so wishes, freeing up customization options on what resources to monitor. Even in its pre-alpha stage, the game showed a remarkable level of visual detail, all the way down to the scale of a single soldier and serf. Another vignette showed a catapult smashing down a separate castle wall, tearing it away brick by brick. Our sword-wielding soldiers wisely dropped their weapons and instead tackled the wall with pickaxes. (We say the game does the real thing justice.) Then he commanded a chunk of our army to siege a castle wall.

#Stronghold crusader 2 reviews full

'We've got full rotations and zooming, and that means we can do some graphical touches.' To show off the team's latest effects wizardry, Harris inflicted a locust storm on the peasants in our demo, all while joking he didn't know what a real locust storm would be like. 'The original Stronghold: Crusader was 2-D, and now we're in a year of 3-D engines,' Harris explained. will also impress old-school Stronghold fans, as will the 3-D engine, which ensures player architects can build castle walls in eight different directions rather than be restricted to Crusader's previous tile-based foundation system. Massive advancements in graphics and simulation A.I. Stronghold: Crusader is its sequel it alone sold over two million copies since 2002.' Three more sequels have joined the roster in the ensuing years, and now, Firefly has freed itself from publisher restrictions with plans to develop Stronghold: Crusader 2 with some help from the crowdfunding platform Gambitious.%Gallery-192690% Crusader 2 is title based on the historical Crusades that swept across the Old World in the first half of the second millennium AD, and the developers have focused much more heavily on the setting's authenticity and polish. It was a surprise hit for publisher Take-Two, and it's gone on to sell six million copies around the world. 'There weren't many castle-building games around then вЂ“ or any, as far as we really knew.

#Stronghold crusader 2 reviews plus

The idea was to create a mix of RTS plus sim plus castle-builder,' Harris told us. During the demo, Firefly Senior Producer Paul Harris would not shy away from what sets it apart from other games in a similar genre and his company's direction going forward.

#Stronghold crusader 2 reviews Pc

Recently, the team at Firefly demoed the PC game in its pre-alpha state for Joystiq, showcasing improvements made to the mechanics from previous iterations in the series, both in the warfare aspect and on the castle sim side. After a slough of mixed reviews for its sequels, developer Firefly Studios says its pulling out all the stops to ensure they can deliver quality with its upcoming RTS-sim Stronghold: Crusader 2.