Stronghold 3

The folks at Firefly knew what they had to do to win back Stronghold fans, and they mostly did it: Everything that annoyed people about Stronghold 2 is gone, and some great new features have been added. Nonetheless, Stronghold 3 needs a few patches and maybe a price cut before it can starting winning new fans for the franchise.

Stronghold 3 its true to its predecessors, too much even! It offers only refined graphics and the night time siege: little compared to what was expected.

Stronghold 3 is a successor that takes up the story of the original and continues it. Wit a back to the roots approach, the game tries to avoid disgrace a la Stronghold 2. The new day and night cycles, plus the physics of collapsing buildings, are a stark contrast to largely drab graphics and some clipping problems. The missing skirmish mode is also a problem. Still, all in all, Stronghold 3 delivers a solid military and economic gameplay.

If you're looking for a decent RTS with a few hiccups here and there that could easily be fixed with a patch or two, Stronghold 3 is not a bad choice. If you're new to the series or new to RTS games in general, you might want to at least wait for a price cut but still give it a chance when that does happen.

Stronghold 3 is one of the last, big, exclusives of PC gaming but it lacks originality and has an amount of bugs able to destroy even the strongest fortified walls. The first patch has made big improvements but there is still a long way to go.

Every once in a while, a glimpse of the intended gameplay shines through in Stronghold 3, and you can see the strategic elements for what they should be. However, there are so many bugs and flaws with the game that it can be really tough to get a true look at its potential.

Too bugs, unpolished features and design mistakes keep Stronghold 3 far from the heights of the series.

Frustrating for newcomers and disappointing for veterans, Stronghold 3 is a combat overhaul away from being any good.

Passion alone isn't enough to make a game great. Stronghold 3 assumes too much of the user initially, and doesn't do enough to keep the village-building fresh and interesting.

It really hurts to see a game that could have been great failing because of lots of small and medium problems. Without bugs it could have easily scored 70 or more, the potential is there.

Nearly charming and challenging enough to be worth enduring sadistic mission design, bugs, and bad controls. Nearly. [Christmas 2011, p.56]

What we got is an unfinished, bug-ridden product that should have never seen the light of day. [December 2011, p.60]

Did Firefly fulfill their promises to deliver a worthy successor of the first game for their fans? Definitely not. Even when you don't look at its many minor flaws, you simply cannot overlook all these elements that transform a relaxing medieval game into a catalyst of negative emotions. Stronghold 3 is the hardest game of the series. I don't mind a high level of difficulty, but it should rely on the game's quests and missions, not the mechanics.

I thought I would've been more engaged in both campaigns, but I felt that both modes were pretty bland. Yes, it had its fun moments but they were few and far between.

You may play a feudal lord in Stronghold 3, but the tedious micromanagement and bugs make you feel like a peasant.

This game has done everything in its power to make you want to quit before you experience it all.

Failure of the year – first two games don't deserve such a disappointing sequel as Stronghold 3 did. Few pros cannot hide a pile of bugs and bad design decisions. [Dec 2011]

I was particularly looking forward to Stronghold 3, so much so I requested the review months ago, and I still find it difficult to believe that Firefly have so spectacularly fouled things up.

Some people - die-hard fans of the sub-genre spring to mind - might be able to get some entertainment from it, but for me and (probably) most gamers it simply gets bogged down in its hundred and five minor flaws and doesn't have enough 'fun' to make it worthwhile... it dies the death of a thousand tiny paper-cuts.

Stronghold might have been great once, but that castle has long since crumbled. Spend your ducats elsewhere.

Stronghold 3 is a bizarre third outlier, clinging to an aging formula but making changes that actually feel like a step back. The real crime here isn't that Stronghold 3 is a bad game, it's the disservice done to a series that has provided so much joy in the past, ruining our nostalgia. Somewhere, a child in a tree fort is weeping.

I wish I could say something positive about Stronghold 3. The closest I can come is to call it Stronghold 1 with better graphics. Even that is unfair to the 2001 original, which at least worked on a basic level – a task sadly above Stronghold 3's capabilities. As much as I wanted to like this game, I can't recommend it in good faith to anyone.

Put bluntly, Stronghold 3 is an unfinished game. It lacks at least a few years of proper development, which is very unfortunate.

Stronghold 3 is boring beyond redemption. The blurb on the retail box should have been written along the lines of "We've run out of ideas, our artists forgot how to draw, and our programmers can't produce stable code anymore, but hey, a long, long time ago we made one really great game!"

I could go on with this litany of problems: random peasants that incessantly block the placement of structures, a ridiculously shallow tutorial, stability problems – but there's no need. Stronghold 3 is a very bad game that simply feels like it was hurriedly cobbled together and released with a minimum of testing.

Ultimately, Stronghold 3 is a promising game that really could have used another year or two of development time.

Buried beneath bugs, control issues, harsh mission design and even harsher economic balancing, there seems to be a shadow of the old Stronghold as we remember it; sometimes you'll even have a minute of fun here and there.