How could they ship a game as bad as this? Firefly Studios has been at the helm of the Stronghold franchise for years now, pumping out quite a few great castle-sims. It was developed by Firefly Studios once again, which is why I am so surprised as to how bad it is.

Join a Faction – Fight with friends to capture villages and return with their banners, offering glory and extra tax income to the winners.The game is the seventh spin-off in a series of games dating back to the original Stronghold in 2001.

Complex Research Tree – Discover new technology to drive your village down the path of farmer, trader, diplomat, warlord and more.

Community Focus – multiple ways to play with friends and foes, from joining up together under a single parish and working together to create a community hub, or ransacking your foes and defending your castle against enemy attack.

Real-Time PvP – battle can happen at any time, meaning that there’s danger even when you’re not online.The game also offers many ways to interact with other players, including parishes that can levy taxes and offer benefits to your villages, resource trading, scouting, multi-language chatrooms, ransacking, and in-depth ranking systems. Similar to The Settlers Online: Castle Empire, the game focuses heavily on resource management, making its resource pipeline in-depth and rewarding to master. The game begins with a single village under advisement by the game’s tutorial character, leading into a relatively short tutorial that shows some basics of the game but allows players to take the reins relatively quickly in comparison to many RTS game introductions. To play, a quick download and install is required, but is rather small in size compared to modern games, standing around 10MB as a final download. Stronghold Kingdoms is a standalone, free-to-play medieval MMORTS developed by Firefly Studios, acting as an MMO version of their already popular and commercially successful Stronghold series of RTS games.

Stronghold 3 review 2015