Stronghold 3

This game has done everything in its power to make you want to quit before you experience it all.

Failure of the year – first two games don't deserve such a disappointing sequel as Stronghold 3 did. Few pros cannot hide a pile of bugs and bad design decisions. [Dec 2011]

I was particularly looking forward to Stronghold 3, so much so I requested the review months ago, and I still find it difficult to believe that Firefly have so spectacularly fouled things up.

Some people - die-hard fans of the sub-genre spring to mind - might be able to get some entertainment from it, but for me and (probably) most gamers it simply gets bogged down in its hundred and five minor flaws and doesn't have enough 'fun' to make it worthwhile... it dies the death of a thousand tiny paper-cuts.

Stronghold might have been great once, but that castle has long since crumbled. Spend your ducats elsewhere.

Stronghold 3 is a bizarre third outlier, clinging to an aging formula but making changes that actually feel like a step back. The real crime here isn't that Stronghold 3 is a bad game, it's the disservice done to a series that has provided so much joy in the past, ruining our nostalgia. Somewhere, a child in a tree fort is weeping.

I wish I could say something positive about Stronghold 3. The closest I can come is to call it Stronghold 1 with better graphics. Even that is unfair to the 2001 original, which at least worked on a basic level – a task sadly above Stronghold 3's capabilities. As much as I wanted to like this game, I can't recommend it in good faith to anyone.

Put bluntly, Stronghold 3 is an unfinished game. It lacks at least a few years of proper development, which is very unfortunate.

Stronghold 3 is boring beyond redemption. The blurb on the retail box should have been written along the lines of "We've run out of ideas, our artists forgot how to draw, and our programmers can't produce stable code anymore, but hey, a long, long time ago we made one really great game!"

I could go on with this litany of problems: random peasants that incessantly block the placement of structures, a ridiculously shallow tutorial, stability problems – but there's no need. Stronghold 3 is a very bad game that simply feels like it was hurriedly cobbled together and released with a minimum of testing.

Ultimately, Stronghold 3 is a promising game that really could have used another year or two of development time.

Buried beneath bugs, control issues, harsh mission design and even harsher economic balancing, there seems to be a shadow of the old Stronghold as we remember it; sometimes you'll even have a minute of fun here and there.