Stronghold Legends strays away from previous instalments in the series, opting for a more mythical based theme and focusing more on traditional real-time strategy gameplay elements rather than the luxury of building impenetrable castles that was found in the original. This time, Legends allows you to play as three different historical figures and their armies, bearing several differences between one another. King Arthur’s army is the more traditional medieval class where you’ll be able to create great legions of knights and wizards, Siegfried includes a number of ice creatures such as polar bears, dwarves and ice giants, and finally Vlad the Impaler and his army consist of more demonic creatures such as bats and dragons.
The game is broken up into several areas, including a campaign mode, custom maps, multiplayer options, as well as a Risk-like battle option. The campaign mode progresses from race-to-race, while the other modes consist of basic skirmishes with different goals. While the game usually provides large battlefields, there’s quite often a lack of variety between your goals during these matches. In the campaign mode it’s basically a battle of strength where you’ll be fighting constantly rather than fulfilling a variety of goals. As shown by the game’s name, you’ll be able to train a number of legend characters to fill your army; such as Merlin the Wizard. These units usually boast excellent skills in combat, as well as having access to magical abilities where you can summon additional units, fireballs or defence auras.
While the transition to a more real-time strategy focus isn’t as well meet as expected, the variety now offered with the inclusion of more units and races does offer a bit more attraction for depth and tactics when opposing opponents. In previous versions it was usually difficult to take out archers mounted in towers, however, now this isn’t much of an issue with the flexibility available with more units. Units in flight can usually act as the perfect choice in taking these units out, as well as there being giants that act as the perfect choice in laying sieges. As opposed to this though, there’s a significant problem with unit balancing and the game's inability to counter-attack some of these new additions. Due to the game’s terrible AI performance, it usually becomes impossible to take down units in flight, as they'll continue to cause havoc to your castle without any resistance.
Castle-building is still a focus in the game, but lacks the enjoyment that was found in previous versions
It baffles the mind why these additions of fantasy creatures were even added in the first place. It strays quite significantly from previously versions in terms of theme, feeling quite unsuited for the game itself. Each race will mainly consist of traditional units such as archers, knights and swordsmen, however you have the choice to include the additional fantasy-themed units such as giants and dragons in the mix for little added purpose. It seems as though these features have only been tacked on to meet the expectations of gamers, rather than actually extending on existing ideas. It’s appalling that the game lacks any explanation as to what buildings provide too. You’ll hover over buildings such as barracks, inns and siege camps where they’ll give you no indication as to what they provide. This is also reflected onto when deciding what units to construct too, with there being no listing of strengths or weaknesses shown. So, for the early parts of the game, you are playing in trial-and-error until you learn the benefits of units and buildings.
If the game wants to play with the big boys in the real-time strategy genre, then it wouldn’t have hurt if the game included some fairly simple and essential features. Combat is a cluttered mess, and feels extremely dated compared to recent outings in the genre. There is no combat collision, the AI is unresponsive to your commands and the resource requirements are far too complicate. Firstly, the game’s AI is an absolute mess. Say for instance you want to attack an enemy, you’ll often find that only several units from the ones you selected will react to the command; with the rest just standing there completely oblivious to what’s going on around them. Not only this, but units won’t react to most fights in front of them. You could have the enemy only metres away from you, and yet neither of them will attack one another. Also, your units may even be fired on and they won’t even react.
The game forces players to accumulate far too many requirements before even beginning an army. In addition to the traditional resources such as stone, wood and food; you're required to manage silly resources such as different foods (apples, cheese), various weapon equipment (bows, crossbows, swords, spears) and variations in armour too. Rather than having the comfort of relying on wood and stone to build a regiment of swordsmen, you’ll need to have your workers gather wood, stone and iron just to satisfy the needs of supplying a sword or piece of armour for one unit. You’ll need to construct several buildings such as armour smiths and bowyers just so you can supply your men with these essentials too. This ultimately slows down the entire process of making quick and easy armies, since you have to spend a lot of time in processing raw materials into equipment for your units.
Hello, detail? Are you here?
Legends lacks an incredible amount of detail too. Units consist of simple, one coloured textures with no added detail to their face, armour or weapons. This lack of detail also reflects on the overall look of the game and the buildings. There’s very little variety between each race – each race has virtually all of the same buildings with little-to-no differences between them. Special effects such as fire and building destruction look equally dreadful. Fire is layered in square patches, units don’t burn, and when buildings are hit by heavy artillery there’s no indication made. Overall, the game looks unbelievably uninspiring when looking at it from a visual point of view.
Audio isn’t much better, especially with misinforming voice prompts popping up throughout the game. These voice prompts will tell you that you’re under attack despite there being no enemies even near you, as well as misinforming you when enemies are approaching your castle. The voice acting for units and key characters is very generic and provides absolutely no immersion at all, with everything appearing as though it was unemotionally read straight off a piece of paper.
Stronghold Legends is an unbelievably dull game that lacks any sort of imagination or detail. It has combined some of the most dated gameplay elements of real-time strategy games, only to rework them into a complete and utter mess. There’s probably one good thing in the game, and that’s its depth; besides that, everything is just a poor version of something we’ve come accustomed to several years ago and grow tired of now.
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