Essentially the same as Stronghold II, the makers of this game did not try to change a winning formula. Some new features and units, along with some significant improvements in graphics make this game attractive to those new to the franchise, and for those who have played the castle attack/ castle defense rts before, the storyline is indoubtably guaranteed to have lured you in to take another attempt at breaching the walls. I did have some gameplay difficulty on high graphics on the extremely large final mission, but basically this game was free of the glitches that paralyzed my campaign in Stronghold 2 again and again.

Drawings 6/10
character pictures 8/10
characters in game 3/10 (barely able to tell difference between individual units)
understandable 8/10
character animation 4/10
water animation 6/10
sounds 8/10
music 9/10

Ability to build walls in an fast effective manner 2/10. The walls are hard to control, hard to know where you can build and where you can not. The towers are hard to place and the game has no intuition to help you auto flip towers in a logical way, why would you want a gaurd tower on a wall facing into your castle with stairs on the outside?
ITs hard to find units in the game, they blend in so much with terrain.
unit intelligence 5/10

This game has a huge foundation, all it needed was a bit of care and effort to make it amazing, on my 2400 imac the game looks like a game i played on my nintendo 20 years ago. They jsut didnt take their time, unit selection is hard with mixed units, unit finding is hard, unit identification is hard, and building quickly and in a efficiant manner is hard, If STARCRAFT the original was 100, this game would be a 40. So sad, i wouldnt pay more than 15 dollars for this game, and thats before you have CONSTANT 3d animation glitches where cubes and such jump across the screen and almost 2 times a map you have units get stuck and can not be moved. I wouldnt buy this game for more than 10-15 dollars having played it, i paid 21 for it on sale i beleive.

Stronghold is the best game ever created. Then they came out with stronghold crusader... absolutely amazing. Then everything went down hill. if you have not tried the first stronghold or stronghold crusader, then you are one of the lucky ones who will enjoy this game and not know what you are missing. But if you have tried the first strongholds then keep your money and don't disappoint yourself by allowing your true experience with stronghold be polluted by this new garbage. Please create a new stronghold with all the experiences of the old strongholds and give back to your fans!!