Report #40

Release Date: 2001 (HD later)

Stronghold is a timeless RTS classic. Set in medieval times you manage a castle and defend it against attackers, while occasionally storming a enemy castle yourself. You have to keep morale up while expanding your economy and military at the same time.

Everybody played and loved Stronghold back in the day. But I never actually finished it, when I was younger. Going into the game I was overwhelmed by nostalgia and had a really great couple of initial hours. It is fun to build defensive fortifications and find ways to cleverly use the terrain to your advantage. The Economy is somewhat basic, but in this case I think less is more. It's diverse enough so that you can vary a bit what you are building and producing, but not so complicated, that it took too much attention away from the military aspects of the game.

About halfway through the campaign, I got a bit tired though. The game has aged quite well, but of course it shows its age. I think the controls could have been better. The maps were a bit small and some of the mission a bit short. In most missions I never got the chance to get to higher tier troops, because I ran out of time. That was a bit anticlimactic. Why have knights in the game when you barely get to use them? Still, all minor complaints.

Achievements: None.

Verdict: Definitely recommended for nostalgia reasons.

Release Date: 2011

Cities XL 2012 is one of the last installments of a series of city builders by Focus Interactive. Besides the usual aspects it features a trading system, that let's you trade between cities to combat ressource deficits and surpluses.

The unique trading system is very interesting, which I'll explain with an example. Each map houses one city as usual. Now, you could for instance play one map and build a city with lots of agricultural industry, which will produce a great food surplus. Then you start a new city on another map, which focuses on heavy industry. It lacks food, which you can import from your first city and in return export heavy industry. Which makes following different development with your cities actually useful.

Unfortunately the game has severe downsides. Though a later installment in a whole series of games, it is still full of bugs, mainly in the UI. The font size is often times so small that you can barely read it, text is wrongly aligned in buttons or boxes and sometimes text is even completely missing and only a dummy text shows up. And that's not because it was a small indie project which ran out of money and never got finished, no, it was just a cash grab. It got released almost unaltered later on as City XXL, still having the same problems. That's just bad business. Therefore: Don't buy it!

Sidenote: I read that a lot of people have performance problems with the game, I encountered none though.

Achievements: None.

Verdict: Fun, but not recommended for bad business practices.

Release Date: 2017

World to the West is a 3-D platformer. It's loosely connected to Teslagrad. It is not necessary to know Teslagrad to play the game though. You play four different characters with different abilities and try to stop a villain from activating a weather control machine.

The game is lovely. Nice art and (mostly) nice music. 3 of the 4 characters are really great (one is a bit pale in comparison). The puzzles are rather easy, more experienced platformers might get bored quickly.

I did not like the heavy amount of backtracking though. There is a fast travel system, but it works separately for each character. Upon reaching a fast travel location, it activates only for the active character and you have to reach it with each character to activate it for everyone. That's just…exhausting.

Achievements: Collectibles, which take a lot of backtracking. Not really my cup of tea.

Verdict: I liked it, slight recommendation.