The Definitive Castle-Building Strategy Game Just Got a Massive Update

Building your own functioning castle town is one of the most uniquely satisfying experiences you’ll ever find in video games — seeing all the little people and pieces fit together like a massive self-sustaining puzzle. The Stronghold games have long been one of the key series in defining the “castle builder” style of real-time strategy, and in 2023, Firefly Studios gave it a new lease of life with the impressively updated Stronghold: Definitive Edition. Now the best game in the series, Stronghold Crusader, has received the same treatment, but it’s much more than that — this Definitive Edition is a genuinely massive update that improves the game in a handful of crucial ways. It’s taken one of the best castle builders of all time and transformed it into something truly definitive.

Stronghold Crusader is the second game in the franchise, released back in 2002 by Firefly — and it crucially made some massive improvements over the first game. While multiple games came after, Crusader is often looked upon as the franchise’s crowning entry, and for good reason.

The gist of Stronghold, if you’re not familiar, is that you need to construct a self-sufficient town, defend from invaders, and overcome other lords — depending on the mode. It plays like a traditional real-time strategy game, but there are three facets you need to balance: economy, happiness, and military.

You need to produce enough food for all your citizens, set the tax rate so you have an income, construct defences, and use gold to hire soldiers to protect everything. So your food economy needs to be robust, but you also need to have workers constructing weapons for your soldiers to use, and during all of this, you need to balance your citizens’ happiness to make sure they don’t leave. It’s certainly a lot to juggle, but there’s untold satisfaction found in fine-tuning your economy and constructing the perfect siege defense — seeing the whole thing basically run itself at a certain point.

Crusader made a handful of really smart improvements, foremost of which was a much greater emphasis on sieges and warfare, versus simply castle defense. This was especially highlighted in the game’s skirmish mode, which let two players duke it out for dominance of a map. To this end, Crusader featured new units and some interesting gameplay tweaks. As the game takes place in the Middle East, environments are largely desert-based, and because of this, you can only build food production buildings on an oasis, which has limited land.

This single brilliant change makes planning your economy drastically more important, and when fighting a skirmish means two armies are often fighting over the incredibly valuable oasis land. This single change gives Crusader a uniquely offensive edge that wasn’t present in the original, and opens up a wealth of tactical options that are bolstered by new units.

It’s always been clear that Crusader was a step up from the first game, but the Definitive Edition makes that drastically more apparent by doubling down on what the game did best, and offering a genuinely impressive amount of new content in the process.

The obvious visual and audio upgrade makes Crusader look and feel better than ever, giving the game a crisp feeling just like the previous Definitive Edition. But the bigger deal is the new gameplay additions, chief of which are bigger maps for skirmish. Having more breathing room is a real boon and cuts down on the claustrophobic feel they could sometimes have in the original game. Skirmash matches now feel much more fittingly like epic, massive battles.

But this version also adds eight brand-new military unit types themed around the Bedouins, giving you some fantastic new offensive options. These new units can genuinely shake up your strategy because of how smartly differentiated they are from the standard units. Heavy camels are a dynamic mounted unit with both an archer and a swordsman riding them, meaning they can be used in a number of strategies — and are particularly useful for hit and run strategies or pestering archers on walls. Meanwhile, Healers (introduced in Crusader 2) can help mitigate damage to your armies, and the Ambusher can hide and use sneak fireport attacks to decimate enemy ranks.

These new units are hired separately from the base ones, and even though there’s a bit of a learning curve on how to use them, the Bedouin units can be an absolute blast to use, really shaking up your strategic options. But the Definitive Edition also provides two new campaigns to walk you through these units, The Baron’s Crusade and The Call to Arms; one focuses on how to defend against Bedouins while the other on how to use them. And what’s even better is that these are quality campaigns that don’t just match the original ones (which are all still there) but often outdo them in terms of dynamic mission design.

The original Crusader’s second mode is called “Trails,” where you play through a series of increasingly difficult skirmish battles. This version adds four new, extra-difficult “Sands of Time” Trails, a co-op trail, and a Custom Skirmish option. Again, that’s on top of everything in the original game still being there. These new stages fully take advantage of Crusader’s improvements, and the co-op Trail in particular is something that feels like an instant fit for the game — with coordination between you and your teammate being crucial.

Stronghold: Definitive Edition was already an impressive refresh for the franchise, but it truly feels like Firefly Studios has taken what it did there and gone above and beyond with Crusader. It can initially be worrying to add big new elements to such a classic strategy game, but everything in the Definitive Edition only enhances what was already great. There are still some issues that were present in the original game, like the occasionally questionable decision from an AI opponent, but in the face of such a rich offering of content, it’s hard to find things like that as a huge problem.

While Crusader’s improvements are generally great, it’s equally important that a pivotal strategy game is now more easily accessible to anyone, and everyone. That alone is worth it, and the thoughtful improvements are just the icing on top.

9/10

Stronghold Crusader: Definitive Edition launches on July 15 for PC.

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