A warning for anyone who wants CastleStorm 2:

[gim]

TL;DR: CastleStorm 2 is bad and rife with false advertising and has been in a state of neglect since 2020. stay with the first game.

The first CastleStorm is, by most accounts, a pretty beloved game. I cannot say the same for CastleStorm 2 personally and I wholeheartedly mean this with 100% seriousness when I say: do not get CastleStorm 2 on EGS, and do not ever get your hopes up for an official Steam release, unless Zen Studios say otherwise.

CastleStorm 2 sucks: here's why

CastleStorm 2, compared to the first game, is an epic failure of a hybird genre game that backtracks on all the unique and interesting features present in the original game while adding new mechanics that have very little to no variation despite the promised 'randomness' you often see touted in the trailers. The real-time strategy aspects are extremely basic and annoying to utilise, the castle building mechanics have been reduced to presets that you cannot edit and have to obtain as 'loot' upon winning fights, gaining new troops is tedious and - with one troop in particular for the sequel's Zombie faction - basically impossible,

"Real-time" strategy map

The game's trailer tries to tout complex empire management like you see in games similar to Civilization and Paradox's Hearts of Iron 4 and Crusader Kings. It is extremely basic in CastleStorm 2 and does not live up to expectations: you mostly care for a few couple resources, primarily gold, ore, stone, wood, and miscellaneous resources that only helps you craft a bunch of projectiles and spells. It is extremely mind-numbing and just generally very poorly thought-out, since you can very easily expand the map and cover the entire field with castles and farm tiles that easily destroy the game's practically non-existent economy. There is no diplomacy with other nations, but that doesn't matter because there isn't even a diplomacy system.

Progression

CastleStorm 2's progression is massively different from Castlestorm 1's progression. It's more like a type of system where you progress and unlock new things differently on every run, rather than your loadout being consistently the same across all factions in the first game. The maximum level of units you can get is Level 5, which - for some of them - is extremely overpowered and makes the game's balancing ridiculously boring.

Projectiles and spells

Also, remember spells and projectiles? You have to buy them with your in-game currency, and unfortunately, they are worse than how they were done in the first game, where you get a whole load of unique projectiles and spells to use against the enemy. There's only two spell types in CastleStorm 2, both of which are way too strong, and the projectiles are just boring variations of each other that either deals extra damage, some environmental damage, or is yet another version of the regular javelin.

No potions that turns enemies to your side, no syringes that heals your troops, and no potions that turns enemies into turkeys either; you just get stone, bombs, and sticks.

There is no castle building system

I already mentioned it, but you can't build your own castles. You have to rely on presets you gain as loot. There is no special rooms that gives you buffs, no rooms that protects your soldiers from projectiles, and it's limited from 3 troops per castle minimum to 6 troops, crippling your ability to defend castles.

Also, you'll likely spend most of your time NOT defending or storming castles despite the name of the game. You'll be dealing with enemy camps or waves of enemies instead. Great, the main appeal the game got sidelined for arbitrary RTS features. Awesome.

Hero characters

But what about the characters? You're stuck with Sir Gavin and Luna, a new hero in the second game. The trailers promote this non-existent ability to choose whatever hero from whatever faction between the Kingdom and the Undead. You can't do that; the game forces you to play the rigid campaign mode that has a pre-selected RTS map with very little choices and deviations in the story that isn't worth getting into because of how bad it is compared to the first game's funnier storyline. There is no uniqueness in CastleStorm 2's campaign modes, other than Luna's story being infinitely worse than Gavin. Sure, in both campaigns, you can get more heroes onto your current run, but that is scripted, part of the story, and very much an awkward transition switching between available heroes.

There's also Lady Meredith, a new unique Kingdom hero who you will never be able to play in the main game despite appearing frequently in trailer material and having a very unique moveset like Gavin, Luna, and Brutus. She is the ONLY unique hero character that you will never be able to unlock in the main game, and can't unlock anywhere else either (outside of the very restrictive Arcade mode, which preselects your character depending on what "mission" you're doing).

The Vikings are gone and the Undead faction sucks

I wanted to like the Undead faction. They suck. Their units are extremely boring and difficult to level up. Zombie swarm units are rendered useless when you unlock the Skeleton Knights (think of Paladins, but with a special mace-spinning ability that breaks the game due to an unpatched bug that lets them deal 1 billion damage). They're also extremely slow. The Kingdom units have abilities that lets them sprint across a battlefield in no time, while the Undead faction just awkwardly shuffles along the map. Ironically, the Zombies can sprint, which is just stupid.

What happened to the Vikings? Well, God knows. I've datamined the game's files and found leftovers of the original CastleStorm 1 Viking factions in the game, with all their animations intact, save for the Dire Wolves and Bears, whose animations and models were retrofitted into CastleStorm 2 as random animal-based enemies. Maybe this is to suggest that the Vikings were meant to reappear in a future DLC or update, which sucks because Zen Studios were trying to be cute by constantly bringing up Chief Ramhorn and Vikingland across both Gavin and Luna's campaign stories. This might be extremely annoying if you were a big fan of Freia, Captain Thorvald, or the Viking faction in general, like I am, because why even bother bringing up the Vikings so often when you're not even going to show them?

And yes, I do mean that sincerely; Chief Ramhorn gets brought up like twice throughout the story, and Vikingland gets mentioned multiple times too, but all you're getting is not a cameo or even a special hero character featuring a Viking character; no. You just get random mentions.

Bugs

There are too many to list, but one of the units being able to deal 1 billion damage and being unable to ever unlock a SPECIFIC Undead army troop (a ghost girl) is merely a droplet in a bucket full of unpatched bugs. And only a portion of that bucket has been patched.

Literally false advertising

The original trailers and demo previews of the game showcased CastleStorm 2 having an intricate Battle and Skirmish system that is somewhat similar to how it was done in the first game, where you boot up a custom game to fight against an AI. Originally, Skirmish mode in the sequel would've generated a map of your choosing alongside you being able to fill the map with various Kingdom or Undead factions. In the final game, Skirmish mode is missing and replaced with minigame-like "Arcade" mode, which is not fun and features characters that you can't even use in the main story.

There is no "endless fun", there is no "co-op" (outside of the very limited Arcade mode), and there is no way to choose factions outside of the campaign mode.

Zen Studios has abandoned all their indie games and are now focused primarily on shilling Pinball titles

All of Zen Studios' other games, which are all exclusively up on Epic Games Store, have been neglected since 2022. CastleStorm 2 got the worse of it, since it only got a couple bug fix updates (MOST OF WHICH WERE BUGS REPORTED BY ME ON RELEASE, BY THE WAY) and immediately stopped receiving updates after November 2020 or so. After that, CastleStorm 2 got mentioned once as going on sale in 2021 or so, before Zen Studios eventually altogether stopped bringing up their indie games - including CastleStorm 2.

There is no hope for CastleStorm. Such a wonderfully weird little game which an immeasurable level of passion has been left to rot with an inadequate sequel that might've been intended to have lots of DLCs and to have its promised features delivered at some point, but I guess this is the price of overambition and - from what I can gather based on information I discovered only recently - corporations screwing the studio so hard that they've abandoned passion in favour of milking virtual pinball machines.

Sorry to disappoint.