Stronghold Crusader: Definitive Edition stands out as one of the best Strategy/Simulation titles in recent memory.
91
Verdict
92%
Steam
—
IGDB
Verdict score based on confidence-adjusted Steam reviews?
Very Positive on Steam (92% positive from 10K reviews)
Healthy player count of 1,480 concurrent
Rich open world to explore
Engaging multiplayer/co-op experience
Limited professional critic coverage
Stronghold: Crusader is a 2002 real-time strategy video game developed by Firefly Studios and originally published by Gathering of Developers for Windows. It is a sequel to the 2001 video game Stronghold. Crusader has much in common with the original Stronghold, but differs from its predecessor in the fact that the game is no longer set in England, instead being set in the Middle East during the Crusades. Another prominent addition not found in its predecessor is a skirmish mode in single-player, allowing customized battles with AI opponents instead of the linear campaign. The game was also released as Stronghold Warchest. This version was a compendium of Stronghold and an enhanced version of Stronghold: Crusader, containing additional characters and an additional Crusader Trail.
Runs well on modern hardware.
Last updated 7d ago
It's good but not as good as the other reviews make it out to be. The reviews seem very biased. I also feel nostalgic towards this game, but what did they actually improve here besides upscaling the sprites? This is basically just Stronghold Crusader with upscaled sprites, which is what you want from a remaster like this, but besides updating the sprites, they did not seem to do much else. Some character animations still run at a very low framerate; this could have easily been improved imo, but not that big of a deal. What is a big deal to me is the fact that they released 2 remasters (both of Stronghold & Stronghold Crusader), and in neither one did they address the biggest issue of the franchise, and that is the incredibly limiting UI. This whole game is about balancing your popularity by making sure your peasants are happy while still taxing them as high as possible at the same time. You do this by balancing various popularity stats (you have to make sure these stats are as high as possible, meaning your peasants are happy and so you can tax them more). The more peasants you have, the more commodities you have to build; otherwise, your popularity stats will drop. But guess what? These stats are still behind submenus, and there is still (after 25 years) no way to pin these stats to the main UI somewhere in a corner or at the top of the screen. This game still uses the exact same menu system from 25+ years ago. So you have to constantly click through submenus to see what your stats are and why your popularity might be dropping. Please let us pin stats like popularity factors to the main UI. I'm still going to recommend to others it because it's not a bad game, but for me personally it's not a fun experience when the games UI is actively working against me by hiding important information. So I will refund it.
Great game, BUT: FIREFLY, just get your s**t together please. Stop RAGEBAITING us with the damn coop trails and release the coop trail editor already. Every patch i can play roughly 2 more hours with my friend, only to sit on dry land again. I say, FREE THE COOP-EDITOR!
TL;DR Game incomplete. Critical Bugs won't get fixed (announced on their discord) - but money grab DLC's are still being released with mediocre lords (which don't 100% work because of some important bugs). Game is basically the upgraded version of the OG SC. Some(!) QoL improvements, bigger maps, more units and buildings, more features like sands of time, Custom CPU Lord creator, workshop. And for 20€ thats a pretty good deal. !HOWEVER! Many bugs from the original version are still in the game - and will never be fixed from the developers. They will stop working on it in summer 2026 and until then, only small bugs will be fixed - but new DLC's will get released, to grab some money from the cash cow. Currently there are many game breaking bugs and it seems like, they don't really care. For example, CPU Lords just won't finish the enemy lord - they will attack their base, destroy the economy, but never finish the kill. This is just one big bug of many ones. The devs stated clearly, that they don't care about them. I don't want to blame the ONE developer (confirmed by Firefly) that is working in this game. Firefly got bought by Devolver Digital in 2021 and that is why they cant choose that they want to finish the game. It's sad, but seems like Firefly also can't do anything about it.
Reviews sourced from Steam. All reviews belong to their respective authors.
Data sourced from RAWG, Steam, IGDB, CheapShark, Wikipedia, HLTB, and GX Corner. Sources: rawg, steam, cheapshark, wikipedia.
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