The good faction is rather boring, flatted out and pretty straight forward as only about 5 heroes with special abilities and better fighting powers are added. Even the connection of the heroes to the King Arthur saga cannot save these new additions from feeling very unnatural to the game. And it is clear that this faction was not enough to fill a whole campaign as the story is progressing very slowly, thinning out quit fast and concluding in boring economy and badly scripted fighting (and special ability using) missions.
The Ice and Bad faction are working definitely better than the Good faction. First of all it adds interesting new units to the unit arsenal like the giants, dwarfs and witches in the İce faction and the werewolves and hounds in the Bad faction. While talking about new units it is also needed to mention that dragons are added too and each faction has a different one. I only see how much my (negative) review of Stronghold 2 was in place as I think the developers also sensed the two main critic points I had which were the low variety in castle building assets and the bad scale of units in relation to buildings and big map. As I mentioned the developer clearly sensed these negative effects unfortunately they did not change the cause of them but only tried to retouch them by chancing other parts of the game.
The clearly thinned out variety of castle building assets in the 2nd Stronghold is tried to counter by added variety in units. A situation the works quiet well as it gives the player something new to discover and try out. Only critic point is that by doing this the game is getting farther away from a real Stronghold.
The attempt to counter the bad scale situation of the 2nd Stronghold is especially well seen in the İce faction. Why do you think giants and dwarfs needed to be added? Or was there a real need for dragons? Or why are many of the bad faction units so big? It all comes back to the scale problem of the 2nd Stronghold.
So instead of fixing the problems of the first one and then add new scenarios and features the added features and scenarios were used to cover up the mistakes of the 2nd Stronghold. But all together the cover up works quiet well in my opinion as Stronghold legends is definitely a better game than Stronghold 2. Also the (still) new 3D graphic of Stronghold work a lot better with this scenario than it did with Stronghold 2. And the scenario is without doubt the best one after the scenario of Stronghold 1.
Still the other problems of Stronghold 2 remain such as for example the bad changes in economy and the separation of the map into counties.
Putting all together the new scenario succeeds in giving this Stronghold a new makeup and clearly elevates it over Stronghold 2. The greatness of Stronghold Crusader or the first Stronghold is not reached by far but that is nothing to be achieved by only trying to cover up mistakes of Stronghold 2.
No comments:
Post a Comment