Graphics/Visuals

Even though it is dated, the Firefly Studios have really took great care in preserving the original 2D sprites and maps from 2001 and rescaled the User Interface to look great on modern widescreen monitors

The animations of the animals, people, buildings have a distinct stylized charm. It doesn’t look like much from the screenshots on the storepage but it all gels together when it’s in motion.

The weakest part of Stronghold’s graphics are the animated conversations of the major characters. It looks very ugly by today’s standard but fortunately it’s a very small part of the game.

Sound/Music

The soundtrack is typical medieval instrumental music, with the strings, brass and wind instruments making up the melody, whereas the percussions and cymbals make up the beat. Some soundtracks include a choir or a single vocalist to accompany the instrumentals.

The SFX of the buildings, people, animals compliment accompanying soundtrack. This creates a surprising amount of atmosphere to this classic game.

Both the SFX and OST hold up well today.

Lastly, the voicework of the scribe and major characters are caricatures of typical archetypes you’d expect in a medieval setting. It is half serious and half hilarious but it still manages to enrich Stronghold HD’s experience.

Gameplay

Stronghold is a Castle building managment with some RTS elements. There are 2 main types of missions. Combat and Economic.

Combat missions include storymode where you must lead a group of rebels to form a kingdom and get revenge on enemy lords for what they did to your family. The story is well designed to ease the player into on the different mechanics of the game.

Economic missions focus on obtaining food/gold and products via industry or commerce. You have more freedom in this mode to design your Castle. I find the difficulty in this mode much higher than the Warfare since scripted events that has fires and diseases can really undo all your progress.

There is also multiplayer which uses Game Ranger. I haven’t played the multiplayer so I have no comment on the experience here.

Hotkeys must be used in this game to get the full experience. Unfortunately Controls are not rebindable. I recommended that you play this with a regular keyboard since 2 hotkeys are missing on tenkeyless boards..

Bugs

As I mentioned in the TL:DR, there are compatibility issues in Win10 which can be easily worked around.

If you play this game with other windows still open in the background, it will flicker often in Stronghold HD. This problem can be fixed if you close or minimize all browsers and programs including chrome/firefox and steam/battlenet client.

Steam overlay does NOT work with this game either