Depending on the scenario you might have to fend off wolves or bandits on the regular, or you might be scrambling to build an impenetrable castle before a siege-ready army arrives. Stronghold doesn’t just look like an RTS, it plays like one too. Your people also need security, which is what the walls and barracks and blacksmiths are for. As long as you keep up with their needs for food and shelter, your castle can continue to expand into a sort of walled town, complete with social edifices like churches and taverns and little decorations like flower beds. They’ll man the buildings you construct, from woodcutter sheds to apple orchards to blacksmith shops, and produce the raw materials you need to build and trade. You have a respect rating with your people, and as long as it’s positive new peasants will come to your keep to work for you. The development of your castle is a pretty interesting balance of peasants and resources. The maps are fake 3D, which is to say they’re 2D tiles placed at elevations to give the illusion of 3D, but they work better than the imperceptible voxel messes of early Tropico games. Arranged much like an isometric real-time strategy game like Command & Conquer, most maps start you off on an undeveloped piece of land on which to place your keep and granary, and then fill in the buildings and walls from there. I’ve been looking at a lot of classic builder games lately and many don’t hold up well at all anymore, but I have to say that the original Stronghold managed to surprise me.Īs you’ve probably gathered, Stronghold puts you under the heavy brow of a king in command of a castle. But even after 15 years, we really just have the Stronghold series to fall back on.

It’s the thing that literally everyone who goes to the beach or gets in the vicinity of building blocks does, after all. It’s strange that there aren’t more castle-builder games out there.

Stronghold 3 review 2016