Stronghold: Crusader II

 PC
User Score
6.0

Mixed or average reviews- based on 250 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 102 out of 250
  2. Mixed: 71 out of 250
  3. Negative: 77 out of 250
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  1. anggadaz
    Oct 27, 2015
    6
    This is strategy game that can build city/castle and army. The previous game is better than this. The game is too heavy (its glitch) for my pc, i dont know why. The game is has not many improve from previous. The graphic is boring.
  2. BatmanBuster
    Jan 4, 2015
    6
    The game play comes from an era when programmers had tons of ideas but only few grams of tools. Nowadays things had changed. Unfortunately not for the good of players as programmers now have tons of tools but only grams of new ideas.
  3. TomPD
    Oct 14, 2014
    5
    I loved the first stronghold crusader, but I do not love the second. It is as many people have said, pretty much the same as the last game, yet this one is worse.

    There are some cool new military units and more tiered options based on the weapons you produce (maces are needed for both macemen and templar knights). Some of the things I loved from the old game are missing like engineers    I loved the first stronghold crusader, but I do not love the second. It is as many people have said, pretty much the same as the last game, yet this one is worse.

    There are some cool new military units and more tiered options based on the weapons you produce (maces are needed for both macemen and templar knights). Some of the things I loved from the old game are missing like engineers and the ability to dig moats. You can put up pallisades but nobody has the wood production for that.

    The game is so much tougher now and quite buggy. The old game made it real clear how to start an early and cheap food economy (apples) and transition to late game (bread). Everything is way more expensive. Wood cutters cost 20 wood now instead of 3 and everything else seems to be at least 50. It wouldn't be as much of an issue if the wood income was also higher, but it is no faster than the old game. Bottom line, you spend all your early gold in this game on basic resources. The economy is just not set up right.

    Gold is hard to come by until you start mass producing stone or something. The market has a nice auto buy/sell feature though.

    The game engine is slow and creates a lot of lag especially as the number of players go up. Many of the animations are buggy. The people can easily get stuck or trapped when setting up new walls and creating tight knit castles which are necessary in the little space you are given.

    Ultimately, I would rather plan the first Stronghold Crusader or Stronghold 2. I think both are more fun.    … Expand
  4. Flaps
    Oct 26, 2014
    5
    I used to play the first Stronghold a long time ago, and it was great at the time.
    Actually I don't see any great improvement in the second chapter, beside graphics.
    Game-play got slightly worse, few really hard mission without any real good fun.
    Old for these years
  5. Doc_Hopwood
    Sep 23, 2014
    5
    For the reviews that say Crusaders II "possesses everything that made you love the first game" they are 100% correct. It's 2002 again and if you bought this game you are the proud owner of a $50 copy of Crusaders 1. Break out your Sony Walkman, crank the Limp Bizkit, and grab yourself a can of Surge (which they're also re-releasing this year).

    Your walls are made out of chalk and    For the reviews that say Crusaders II "possesses everything that made you love the first game" they are 100% correct. It's 2002 again and if you bought this game you are the proud owner of a $50 copy of Crusaders 1. Break out your Sony Walkman, crank the Limp Bizkit, and grab yourself a can of Surge (which they're also re-releasing this year).

    Your walls are made out of chalk and disintegrate into powder at the first sign of trouble. The big battles you see in previews? Those don't happen... instead your mob of cheap units crashes into their mob of cheap units. Formations and all that stuff are meaningless. You can build a big city in the sandbox game and play around a little and that's alright but then you're just putzing around collecting resources and decorating a screen.

    I don't typically care about graphics but the only thing I can point to that is different from the 2002 release from this series is a barely perceptible bump in graphics quality. Everything else is pretty much the same dated game with bland mechanics. I really wanted this to be a good castle sim but it isn't.. small maps, ho hum AI, dated everything... and I fell for it again.

    And for $50?!?!?!. I'd give it a 6 or 7 for a price tag of $15 but this game is priced in the same neighborhood along with really good new releases.. save the $50 and get Age of Empires II HD or buy the HD version of one of the old Stronghold games (because that's essentially what this is). Unless you just love Stronghold Crusaders and want to play it with a couple new NPC lords (which changes almost nothing really). In which case, go for it.    … Expand
  6. Shadow34
    Oct 4, 2014
    5
    I wasn't expecting Stronghold Crusader II to be absolutely new game, i didn't expect it to change whole game system and redo everything but... There is NOTHING new in this release. Its almost the same game as HD version of old Crusader with better graphics. If u want to play same game again buy it... But if you want changes, any changes don't. It even contains icons from old Strongholds.
  7. Agarensis
    Sep 26, 2014
    6
    Spent a couple days with this game and while it's so far decent, it needs improvement.

    The game comes with three short campaigns that act as introductions to the economics and military tactics. There's also Crusader Trails, which are a series of pre-made matches with AI players. They are much shorter than the two in the first game, but there are also more of them. There's also the    Spent a couple days with this game and while it's so far decent, it needs improvement.

    The game comes with three short campaigns that act as introductions to the economics and military tactics. There's also Crusader Trails, which are a series of pre-made matches with AI players. They are much shorter than the two in the first game, but there are also more of them. There's also the customized Crusader skirmish games for single and multiplayer, and a sandbox mode for freely building a castle.

    Graphically the game is decent; it ran fine for me without any crashes so far, but there were bugs such as a healer getting stuck on a staircase, and issues with unit stances. Much of the audio is retained from previous Stronghold games, notably Stronghold 2 and the original Crusader. The AI players however still don't speak their lines of dialogue when addressing the human player, and instead wobble their heads about while making faces.

    Building costs are needlessly inflated, and I found myself having to constantly buy wood every time I placed a couple structures, or even one hovel. While I can understand wood being a rarer commodity in the desert, 200 wood for a mill or an inn is ridiculous, let alone 20 just for a woodcutter, and having several woodcutters isn't enough to keep up with the wood demand.

    The economics are also strange. Stone and iron don't seem as valuable when sold as they used to be, despite being the two mineral deposits everyone fights for. Ox tethers transport stone and iron without their usual peasant handler. Chandlers make their candles seemingly out of thin air, while everything else needs an input of raw materials. Every weapon now has its own forge, as opposed to the original where fletchers and blacksmiths could alternate between the weapon types they made. No more leather armour; crossbowmen now wear metal armour and macemen have chainmail, but strangely only need their maces crafted.

    You are confined primarily to building within a bordered estate as previously introduced in Stronghold 2, though you can build in neutral or allied territory to an extent. The game forces you to compact everything close for efficiency, but at the expense of feeling severely boxed in, and you must aggressively defend your outlying farms and mines from attacks, or spend another several hundred in wood to replace them. Everything is square shaped, including your castle towers (no round towers except the tall, thin ones), and with what few castle building options that are available, neither you or the AI players will build anything grand. Even in sandbox mode your castle will probably look more like King Friday's of Mr Roger's Neighbourhood than your personal Krak des Chevaliers. Depending on the map you can even get away with just building a well defended wall between two sections of mountain, backed by a few towers, which is hardly the point of a Stronghold game.

    The combat is faced paced, and the AI players (currently 8, with more rumoured to come) are fairly well balanced with their tactics. Even the revamped version of the Rat makes use of siege engines. Players will either rush you with mobs of cheap troops or turtle towards attacking with stronger armies, though the battles are closer to small skirmishes than the clashing of armies. The variety of units available is pretty good, and the game requires you to build a more balanced army, rather than spamming your enemy with horse archers or mobs of assassins; though archers and crossbowmen still dominate most of the fights, and mobs of macemen can still destroy almost anything they encounter. Siege engines are recruited from siege camps and don't require engineer teams anymore. There's a variety of engines from battering rams and burning carts, to catapults and trebuchets, even Hussite war wagons to protect some of your archers. I don't understand the need for two catapult types though, since you already had a catapult and trebuchet in the previous games, and they both had their pros and cons. The more expensive catapult (referred to as a War Wolf) looks big, cool and does more damage than the regular one, but all of the structures and castle walls are frail enough, even when attacked by infantry. Castle walls are too easily broken, something I didn't like about the Stronghold games from Stronghold 2 onwards. Even in games like Age of Empires or Medieval Total War it would take several shots from a catapult or trebuchet to break through a stone wall, just as it did in Medieval times. Here though it's like launching a bowling ball at Lego bricks, though you can also instantly repair your structures so long as the enemy isn't too close to them.

    Currently this games is closer to a Medieval Command and Conquer, than the castle building sim with RTS elements that the first Stronghold Crusader was. Perhaps with a few patches the game can improve, but given the amount of streamlining I'm not sure by how much. Tough recommendation.    … Expand
  8. tobiaski95
    Sep 28, 2014
    6
    I was expecting a lot more of this game, especially because of the campaign FireFly used on Youtube to promote it by sharing development updates and behind-the-scenes videos. I expected Stronghold Crusader + new content, but it has not a lot of new buildings at all. Also, the ratios for resources are way too oversized. 20 wood for a woodcutter? In SH:C is only took 3 wood.

    For the sake    I was expecting a lot more of this game, especially because of the campaign FireFly used on Youtube to promote it by sharing development updates and behind-the-scenes videos. I expected Stronghold Crusader + new content, but it has not a lot of new buildings at all. Also, the ratios for resources are way too oversized. 20 wood for a woodcutter? In SH:C is only took 3 wood.

    For the sake of the knowledge I have on developing games, I know how long it takes to create a game including art, speech, etc. Maybe there was shortage of time and FireFly had to recycle the audio from previous games.

    What makes me rate this game a 6? I like the new characters like the Sultana and the Slave King. They are different from previous SH:C in terms of armies and management. Also, the 3D graphics look OK.

    I don't recommend to buy the game at this moment; wait until the price drops. If you are new to this genre, please but SH1 or SH:C first because they are still the best of the series.    … Expand
  9. Tubey
    Sep 23, 2014
    6
    I'm outright confused that this game is a 2014 release. It's the original game with a few UI boosts and almost identical graphics with a polish on them. That said, that doesn't make it a bad game as such because the original was actually pretty good. But I just don't understand what the objective was here as usually with a sequel you try to add and expand on the original. Yes, the AI isI'm outright confused that this game is a 2014 release. It's the original game with a few UI boosts and almost identical graphics with a polish on them. That said, that doesn't make it a bad game as such because the original was actually pretty good. But I just don't understand what the objective was here as usually with a sequel you try to add and expand on the original. Yes, the AI is notably smarter, so what we have here is the original, but smarter. Oh, and streamlined, which is the fashion for these titles, everything has to be simpler it seems, but unlike the Total War series at least it hasn't stripped everything and anything out for that purpose.

    If you're looking for more of the same, this title is for you as it plays it safe almost to a fault. So much so that even the sound is absolutely identical to its' predecessor. Such an odd game to score as there's nothing wrong with it, but nothing particularly eye catching in terms of new features or impetus to buy in 2014. Puzzling.    … Expand
  10. Seilof
    Sep 24, 2014
    6
    It is a very good game, with the "bugs" from the last stronghold crusader. If you don't mind that, stronghold crusader 2 has the same lovely gameplay known from (the better) stronghold 1 and stronghold crusader 2.
    Its no visual beauty, but the graphics get the job done.
  11. Triggrd
    Dec 14, 2015
    5
    Its like they had really good ideas at first and were really motivated to redeem themselves from what stronghold 3 had become and at some point just decided to become crack addicts releasing the game without the most basic polish to get more money to buy crack.
    It isn't as bad as it was back when it came out but it still feels like a crippled child who is wearing a stronghold1-fanshirt.    Its like they had really good ideas at first and were really motivated to redeem themselves from what stronghold 3 had become and at some point just decided to become crack addicts releasing the game without the most basic polish to get more money to buy crack.
    It isn't as bad as it was back when it came out but it still feels like a crippled child who is wearing a stronghold1-fanshirt. For example the whole video/dialogue thingy is actually a thousand times worst than in their FIRST game OVER 10 YEARS AGO.
    |
    BUT!
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    You will still find some fun in the difficulty and the whole castle building (enough for 5 solid points) but it'll just piss you off that you bought something that is worse than its over 10 years old predecessor and what will piss you off even more is the fact that sometimes you can almost feel what some of the developers were trying to do with this game but just **** up real bad    … Expand
  12. Merti
    Mar 21, 2022
    6
    They scored on the game ... Developed, return the stronghold to us, or, well, work with the 2-part
  13. cercisyusuf
    Sep 8, 2023
    7
    they dont do new thinks we need more soldier types and more lord types so score is not so nice
  14. IamNader
    May 9, 2023
    6
    Love the first game and it is similar to the original, but unique enough to feel the difference - 6/10

Awards & Rankings

73
#73 Most Discussed PC Game of 2014
30
#30 Most Shared PC Game of 2014

Critic Reviews

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Metascore
65

Mixed or average reviews - based on 30 Critic Reviews

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 8 out of 30
  2. Mixed: 19 out of 30
  3. Negative: 3 out of 30
  1. CD-Action
    Dec 13, 2014
    40
    When I read that Crusader is slowly becoming the game the developers wanted it to be, I can’t hold back laughter. What are they going to do in Crusader III? Strip the visuals of distinctiveness even more? Simplify the economy further? Remove some more units? [Dec 2014, p.81]
  2. Games.cz
    Dec 3, 2014
    60
    Blast from the past when real-time strategies used to dominate the world. The creators took the concept of the first part almost completely and besides the updated visuals there is no extra value added to differentiate the sequel from the original.
    Read full review
  3. Game World Navigator Magazine
    Oct 25, 2014
    46
    When it comes to the fight the game remains as clueless as before. An attack resembles a mob hit on the madhouse watchman's post: confused fighters run toward the target and drop dead on the way. All three formations are designed to provide a semblance of order, but after right click on the enemy such order immediately thrown into chaos. And, just as before, two dozen archers on the wall solve most of the issues of defense. The visual part of the game just aggravates the impression that ... Oops, there is no impression actually. Nobody creates games in this way anymore. [Nov 2014, p.99]
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