Genre: Real Time Strategy
Publisher: Witt Publishing
Developer: Related Designs
Release Date: October 12, 2004

Buy 'CASTLE STRIKE': PC

Related Designs' Castle Strike is set in 14th century medieval Europe during the Hundred Years' War. Within the single player campaign, players must lead their troops through 27 missions, all while maintaining servants and troops, building castles and fortifications, dealing with land-hungry neighbors and aggressive knights, fighting battles to defend the family honor, and most importantly, rescuing damsels in distress.

Now, I’ve been playing the title for a few days now, and I have to say, I think I missed the boat. It’s not a bad game, but I just seemed to have an inordinate amount of difficulty with the interface because it's not standard strategy fare. Let me explain a bit, because there were quite a few features that I really liked, once I figured out how to use them.

Starting with the peasant controls, the biggest change is that you no longer have to grab a group of peasants and tell them to harvest lumber. You can still do that if it really floats your boat, but I like the game's system of control better. You have a slider that controls the percentage split of peasants between building/repairing and gathering resources. Now you go on to the resource triangle, which controls how the peasants that you allotted to resource production are split up between the three resources. Set your two sliders, click the "go to work" button, and off they go! It certainly saves a lot of time, and you don’t have to constantly check up on your workers, so long as you hit that button every now and again..

Unlike most games, there is no trial and error with castle construction. You start by laying out your walls, complete with gates, towers and appropriate upgrades, but nothing actually gets built until you are sure you have got it just the way you want it. Then, you pay to execute the building contract, and presto, the castle grows from the ground like a demented beanstalk! You can scrap the whole design at any time before that, so you won't have to tear down walls and rebuild them all over and over (again, unless you REALLY want to).

Another thing I found particularly cool was how the production screens are broken down. All of your castle buildings are built from one sub-menu, and all of your unit productions, from peasants to military units, are handled from another sub-menu. There are also individual menus for village buildings, siege machinery, and technology upgrades. Being able to handle all of your tech upgrades from one screen made keeping up with the upgrades much, much easier.

The camera controls in the game are completely amazing because you can do just about anything you would like to do with the camera (be nice!). There's full rotation and tilt, along with a zoom that can go from a good wide angle, all the way down to looking at individual faces. Actually, it seems a little over the top, but it's very cool nonetheless.

Units can be grouped with a leader in to a 'banner," which allows you to change between three formations, each with its own benefits. Formation 1 gives all units in the banner a large attack bonus and a smaller defensive bonus, while formation 2 gives a large defensive bonus and a smaller attack bonus. Formation 3 gives no bonuses to attack or defense, but increases the group’s speed and stamina.

The single player campaigns are well done, with a good background story. The difficulty level of Castle Strike is slightly higher than most games, but still worth the challenge. The AI is adequate, but nothing to write home about, and online play is handled through Game Spy, so there are no rookie mistakes to be seen here. There are several multiplayer maps, and they come with a random map generator so you and up to three other friends can fortify your castles and then battle it out until there is a clear winner.

Okay, onto the bad news. Now, I’m not sure if this is because I was given a review build as opposed to a retail copy, but I tried this game on three different computers, ranging from your standard home setup up to a top-of-the-line gaming rig, and had problems with lag on all three. It wasn’t quite as bad on the top-end machine, but the others had serious issues.

The graphics and audio were adequate, but nothing spectacular. When in full zoom, the details are pretty amazing, but they disappear quickly as you zoom out, leaving them somewhat drab.

I seemed to have tremendous difficulty with the interface. I liked the way it was laid out, but because it was unfamiliar, it seemed clumsy, even cumbersome at times. Most of that can be attributed to user error, because as I played more, the interface started to feel a bit more natural. Give yourself a bit of time to get used to the feel of it before you start taking on opponents online because the learning curve is pretty steep over here. All in all, Castle Strike is a solid and entertaining RTS game, once you figure out the controls, that is ....

Score : 7.5/10