Stronghold Kingdoms Review

Stronghold Kingdoms is the world’s first persistent castle MMO strategy game, developed by Firefly Studios. This game captures all the atmosphere, rivalries and alliances of the medieval period. You are free to discover new villages (with the right amount of gold of course), get rid of insufferable dynasties, invade and plunder your neighbor’s resources or choose the path of peace through diplomacy.

You can willingly design your lord or lady avatar and coat of arms with the characteristics and colors you desire. Furthermore, resource management is essential for progressing the game. During your farming life, it is obligatory to produce a sufficient amount of food and drinks including cheese, bread, apples, ale and much more to keep your citizens well fed, drunk and happy! Also, a variety of building materials such as wood, stone, iron or gold can be produced and will be the means to start building your empire from single huts and stables to huge barracks, stone walls and castles. The game is designed to motivate you develop your lands through quest achievements. Useful prizes are provided every time you finish its requests.

Strategy Cards are also a great element through the evolution of the game and they can affect almost all fuctions of the game. For example, a card may grow the amount of armor in your inventory, the portions of venison provided to your citizens and much more. To be precise and accurate an “advanced fishing card” causes a fair increase of sea life caught. The duration of those cards is changeable and varies. In the last mentioned example this booster has twelve-hour duration and during this time your ability factor is multiplied by 5.

Each player has the opportunity to create a parish with members of the community through private dialogue boxes to negotiate, plan your strategies, take your ambitions to the next level and even vote for your leader. Like an emperor’s routine, the ambitious conqueror must be decisive and active. Command the army to plunder prosperous castles, increase or decrease the daily food production and emphasize always on critical matters. Every single day has new challenges and issues, threatening the stability of your empire. Every action has an impact on your command so you must be careful and always keep things in balance. A fine example is tax management. Increasing taxes will result in raising your income but on the other hand, makes people upset and unsatisfied for your decisions. If you overdo it you will start losing citizens since they will start abandoning your cities.

Players obtain research points to spend on researching new technology. Completing a research unlocks the advanced building, troops and resource types for the players to invest on. But at the same time your performance on getting full knowledge of this upgrade decreases. Certain researches require the player to be of a specific rank before they can study a special skill, and certain research branches unlock new ones for the player once completed. Each character upgrade gives the player 3 new research points to spend. Another alternative is to buy them with your gold but be careful their cost increases from one purchase to another.

Furthermore, one other dynamically grown element of the game is your ability to trade (sell-buy), scout and attack the parishes you desire to conquer whenever you wish to. You can fight alone to take control of a land, helping your allies or even defend your own kingdom when needed. But a war can be equally victorious also without a conflict. Level up your theology skill, study to create powerful monks and infiltrate your enemy’s city by influencing its people. They will lose faith and the realm will fall like a castle in the sand! You are free to select where in the global map you wish to place and start raising your kingdom. You want to be in Mexico and maybe fight for the glory of the Aztecs? You want to be in Egypt and bring back the great wealth of the Pharaohs? Or in Greece to visualize again the power of ancient democracy? Fight for glory and dominate the land.
The question is: “CAN YOU HANDLE IT”?