1/8/2024 0 Comments Stronghold warlords review![]() Both your units and the enemies will consistently make you facepalm with tactics that are sure to lead to their doom. This is all compounded by the game’s absolutely dense AI. These are persistent problems throughout the game with very few single-player levels breaking out of this routine. Resources get collected too slowly, your armies are constantly on the verge of death and your bases end up being too squeezed by the scenery to become interesting. That’s all you need to know to be successful at Stronghold: Warlords and while that’s pretty par for the course when it comes to RTS games, the loop here is just plain unsatisfying. Build settlements, train units, attack repeat. ![]() Things got off to a poor start with the game’s tutorials which, set up what was to be a pretty boring experience to be frank. Sadly that’s really where my enjoyment of Stronghold: Warlords comes to an end. This setting in general is one that doesn’t get much attention in gaming so to be able to explore it more in-depth was at least for my inner-history nerd. You’ll take command of massive armies as the Great Kahns of the Mongol Empire, the powerful Japanese Shogunates, and the Imperial Chinese forces. Warlords is the first game in the series to not take place on the battlefields of medieval Europe but rather takes place in the far east, during the titular Warlords era. So while this is my first experience with the series it does have nearly 20 years of history to build off of. I was always aware of the Stronghold series of RTS games but for some reason never took the chance to dive in. ![]() Has my search reached its send with Stronghold: Warlords? Read on to find out. So whenever a chance comes up to review a new real-time strategy game you know I’m jumping at it, in hope that maybe, just maybe, I’ll find a new favorite. And while the RTS genre has been far from quiet in the last decade or so, aside from a few notable exceptions, I never did find a game that matched those classics. This was thanks to games like Command & Conquer, StarCraft, and Age of Empires – games that I would sit down for hours on end, trying to find the best strategies to take on my enemies. There's a little bit of visual variation in architecture, but overall, it's all a weirdly homogenous abstraction of a setting that spans an entire continent and over a thousand years of history.Growing up, I considered myself a pretty serious PC gamer. Genghis Khan can hire Ninja and Samurai units just as easily as his rival, the shogun, can get Mongol horse archers. In multiplayer and skirmish vs AI, on the other hand, that distinction is lost: not only are the unit rosters identical for each army, your Imperial Swordsmen will always speak Chinese even if you're playing as the Vietnamese. While the grand keeps and shining pagodas are detailed and attractive, these low polygon, flat-looking unit models could be outshone by something like the original Company of Heroes, which came out almost 15 years ago.Įach of the six single-player campaigns, which are around six to 10 hours long, take you to a different time and place in history, they only seem like distinct factions because most missions limit what you can build. It's not terrible, it just feels very behind the times compared to more recent RTSes like Northgard or Total War. But overall, these fights are very old-school Age of Empires in their pacing and scale. “There is a huge gap in movement speed between lower-tier skirmishers and the tanky imperial troops you can get later in the tech tree, which does allow a savvy commander to outmaneuver a more potent army and win the day.
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