I really enjoyed this game. I loved the realism of crime, rats and piles of waste to be cleaned up. The graphics were passable, and the landscapes were not boring. There are mountains, rivers and pits of pitch. Overall, it was really fun and I would recommend it to anyone.

I liked this title. Simulated siege warfare is always exciting, especially when the graphics are tuned enough to communicate the particular brand of chaos and action inherent in medieval conflict. And I've always enjoyed the idea of building a massive fortress.

In Stronghold 2, the object of the game is to build up a castle and, in some modes, to build an army and overwhelm your enemies' castles. The focus in the game on both of those things, really, and not one over the other. You have to pay attention to your settlement's economy. Is there enough food in the granary? Enough variety? How do the peasants feel about you? Are they happy or sad? Should you lower your taxes, or just build an inn and a brewery to make the peasants not care?

These considerations are not unimportant, because if you manage your castle badly enough, peasants will start to leave. This means no one will be working your orchards, and there will be no one to recruit into your military. In other words, your development halts completely.

Once you've built a semi-stable economy, you can concentrate on your military. You'll want to build walls early for protection. These can be anything from simple wooden palisades to triple-thick stone behemoths. Once you have the walls of your castle built, you can fortify them with several different tower designs. Don't forget to send archers up the towers. They can achieve incredible range if placed correctly, and will devastate enemy troops who aren't wearing metal armor. For metal-clad foes, stick a ballista or two on your towers as well, then watch the fun when someone comes too close as a three-foot spike is launched at them your tower-mounted Barry Bonds-like crossbows.

In this game, the best offense really is a good defense. Make your castle an impregnable fortress, and you can take your time preparing sorties against the enemy.

There is a wide range of unit selection, and each has a situation in which they excel. Thieves infiltrate the enemy castle and steal gold for you from their treasury. Assassins (incredibly useful) use grappling hooks to scale castle walls and open gates for your troops. Swordsmen and Knights are tough to bring down thanks to their armor, and make excellent front-line troops. And if you manage to run a unit of Crossbowmen up an enemy tower, they will dominate the entire courtyard below with their bolts.

Fighting a large-scale siege is a singularly thrilling experience. Watching several hundred individual units charge a wall, set up ladders, and climb up to do battle with defenders all under a withering hail of arrow-fire and ballista bolts is incredibly fun. You feel sort of like a warlord from ages past when you give your swordsmen the order to charge and hear them roar a battle cry as they run.

Set up a few trebuchets for some real action. Imagine those swordsmen charging while boulders fly over their heads, smashing into walls, spraying chunks of stone in every direction and sending wailing archers head-over-heels through the air.

But wait. If warfare isn't your thing, would this game hold any allure for you? Sure!

There's a whole campaign dedicated to castle life rather than siege warfare. And while combat still has a role, it's rather limited. In this campaign you'll be more concerned with keeping rats out of the settlement or providing enough food to keep a neighboring ally's peasants alive, or reducing the local wolf population.

I found this campaign to be just as fun as the combat-oriented one. The peasants are funny, and their working animations are interesting. Curious onlooker-type gamers will find themselves following around individual peasants to see what they do, and what they say while doing it. For example, vintners make a subtle Kids in the Hall reference while stomping grapes: "I hate grapes. Hate 'em. I'm crushing you, grape. Crushing your head. Die, die, die." And since all those who share the same profession look alike and have the same voice, it's only natural every now then for them to break the fourth wall and comment "Do you ever get that feeling of deja vu?" Tax them too highly, and they'll complain when you click on them. Feed them double rations, and they'll laud your generosity.

If you like siege warfare, or castles in general, or realtime strategy games, or simulations--you'll probably enjoy this game. The only quibbles I had with it were a paper-thin story and a rather un-customizable multiplayer experience.

Overall this is a very fun game, but it suffers from some bugs. There are two parts to the game. The first is really just an extended tutorial that shows you how to build up and manage your castle. I found this part kind of boring. The second part is where you defend your castle and attack others. This is when the game got fun for me as I explored different strategies. Unfortunately once I got good at the game, it became too easy to outwit the very stupid computer opponents. For example, on one of the missions I had to defend my castle from a large squad of invaders. The definition of success was that my lord stayed alive and all of the attackers were dead. Even if the computer destroyed all of my castle and all other units, as long as my lord stayed alive I would win. So as an experiment I literally did nothing to protect my castle and let it got completely overrun. I left all of my defenders where they were when the mission started without issuing any orders and watched as most of them get slaughtered. Then when the bad guys came for my lord, I just had the lord run in circles. They followed him all around the map, but could never catch him. All the while my handful of remaining archers on the walls managed to shoot and kill dozens of heavily-armored knights who were ignoring the archers. I also could lead them to walk over and under traps.

Pro:
* Low cost ([...])
* Good sense of humor
* Great 3-D graphics
* Nice balance of making your people happy and making them your slaves
* You can build and issue commands while the game is paused
* It's fun to build castles
* It's fun to defend you castle
* It's fun to attack other castles

Con:
* Too short
* High system demands
* Non-combat missions can be boring
* Very stupid computer opponents (they often don't realize they are being attacked and just stand there and let you kill them)
* Estate system doesn't make sense (there is rarely any reason to take over another estate since you can't effectively use its resources)
* Serious bugs where you cannot produce certain resources under certain circumstances (for example, it sometimes would not let me make bread or wine), which kept me from being able to complete one of the missions

Excellent game. You have to build your city and the commodity chains as well, including the production of food and military supplies. Very exciting and challenging, you'll have great time trying to organize your city to get to the objective just in time.

I bought the first, and was disappointed. Then I fell for Crusader. Better, but still fell short of expectations and just not fun enough to recommend. Now we get this garbage. Rather than fix the management of the game and the actual warfare, what we get is more BS to juggle. Goodluck if you choose the warfare campaign, you'll be too busy trying to deal with ever growing crime problems while the computer either a.) sits back and does nothing the entire game or b.) attacks you with hundreds of troops 5 minutes into the game. At no point in the week of playing this have I been able to build a attack worthy army, nor even a decent castle. Not to mention that most of the maps, the terrain is so cluttered and setup that castle building is essentially impossible. Not that it matters because you pretty much don't have time to collect sufficient stone to build one anyway. If you are looking for a game of castle defending and sieging, look elsewhere.
Other cons: slow and buggy