Castle Sim Games: Stronghold Kingdoms Online Review

Castle Sim Games: Stronghold Kingdoms Online Review
Page content

Stronghold Kingdoms Basics (4 out of 5)

Stronghold Kingdoms offers much of the same style of game play as the popular castle building sim Stronghold. You’ll start with a simple empty town and it’s up to you to build it up and create a great castle. You’ll create multiple structures and through a huge technology tree unlock various technologies. You’ll join a parish, which is a collection of towns, and battle others on the game map. Use scouts, merchants, and build military units such as archers for your castle. Feed your people and keep them happy with entertainment and ale. Build up your town and expand to own new ones on the game map.

Building Your Town (4 out of 5)

Stronghold Kingdoms

With Stronghold kingdoms, you get a wealth of different buildings to construct for your town. You have stone, and wood as your basic building resources and these buildings will be the bulk of your first structures. You will have different food buildings, which make staples such as apples, cheese, meat, and bread. You’ll need to keep up your food reserves and make choices with rations to keep your people happy. On the military side, you’ll make structures such as a fletcher for arrows for archers. Entertainment and decorative buildings are also available as well as religious structures such as a church. Some structures need technology to unlock them for your town.

Technology (5 out of 5)

A big part of Stronghold Kingdoms is a huge technology tree. As you play you’ll gain points to level up in the game. As you level, you’ll unlock new technologies to train. There are multiple branches on the technology tree such as industry, farming and military. With each level, you’ll only gain a few points to spend but with game coins through taxes, you can train additional technologies. There are multiple buildings and different units to build. The vast number of technologies is a great addition to the game and gives it a nice strategy element. Most players will start with farming and industry technologies before moving onto the military sideof the game since you’ll need a huge resource base to work with.

Interface/Game Map (4 out of 5)

Stronghold Kingdoms

The interface of the game is very good and easy to use. At the top of the game, you’ll find the main tabs such as your town, technology tree, player level, and troop training. Click the tabs in your city to construct structures and place them in your town. You’ll find a tab that gives you an overview of your town’s happiness so you can adjust your city where you are having problems. You can click your town center and see how many resources you have. Stronghold Kingdoms has a great map where you can go on scouting missions, attack NPC towns, battle other game users, or attack lairs. View your messages to see where your soldiers are on the map and how the battles have turned out.

Graphics/Sound (3 out of 5)

The graphics in Stronghold Kingdoms look great. You can see your citizens working in your town and the battles are nicely animated with flying arrows and other elements. One part of the game that is a big letdown is that there is no sound at all. It would be nice to hear some token city sounds, a soundtrack or some battle sounds but it doesn’t exist in this game. This is puzzling since many other browser-based games have sound. Despite the lack of sound, the game play is still great but sound would just enhance an already great castle simulator.

Game Play (4 out of 5)

Stronghold Kingdoms is a great castle simulator and it’s nice to be able to play the game online. The lack of sound is a big disappointment but the rest of the game takes up the slack. You’ll find dozens of buildings to construct and the technology tree features enough content to keep you busy for a long time. Your town will develop slowly which adds to the simulation feel of the game. At some point it would be great to see some sounds added to the game.

Multiplayer (4 out of 5)

At rank 14, you can join a faction and battle with a team on the game map. As a player, you’ll also be a part of a parish, which is a collection of towns with a city. You can be elected leader of the parish through voting. The game has a nice multiplayer element to it. Chat is available through the setting link at the top of the screen.

References

All images from Stronghold Kingdoms

Source: Article is author’s own experiences playing Stronghold Kingdoms.