Stronghold Legends may well be the best game in the series. The addition of special units gives you much more flexible tactics on both attack and defense, and town management is streamlined, eliminating many of the more tedious chores that Stronghold 2 saddled you with.
Which makes it all the more tragic that I'm playing this game fourth, because I can't stand it. I'm just not interested in anything it has to offer. I don't want to be King Arthur. I don't want to engage in siege warfare. I don't want to build a fantasy medieval city. Without the sewage and vermin management of the previous game, there really isn't much of a point.
I thought taking a two game break would help me clear my head. All it did was make me more accustomed to games that had some hook that made me interested. I've already exhausted all the fun I'm going to get out of this series and there are still 55 hours left to go.
If you've been following the blog since the beginning, you may remember that one of the first things I revealed to you is that I don't like RTS games. If you've been paying especially close attention, you may realize that this dislike has rarely been born out in practice. About half the RTS games I've played so far, I've come to grudgingly respect, and even passably enjoy.
But the Stronghold series is reminding me why suspicion is my baseline attitude towards the genre. Everything you build is constantly under threat. And if you take the time to focus on sustainability or aesthetics, your faster enemies will destroy you. And even if you're in a position to win, you have to do so by destroying something another player has built. And you must always be clicking. There's no stillness to it, and precious little beauty, and everything functional is a weapon. I just want to spy, omnisciently, on a miniature manor economy, thriving in times of peace, is that so much to ask?
Anyway, I have to figure out some way to get through this. Some alternate set of goals. I could commit to beating the campaign, but I've got a super thin skin about that just now. Because defeat means starting to build all over from scratch, the difference between "loss that hardens my resolve to do better" and "loss that makes me want to quit in disgust" is not nearly large enough to keep me going.
I think I may have to draw on some deeper reserves of strength. Remind myself that if I can finish this before Friday, I'll be ahead of schedule on my goal for the year. Focus on the fact that I have only two more Stronghold games to go. It is ridiculously melodramatic of me to pretend that playing a video game that I'm slightly less than interested in constitutes some kind of epic trial of endurance, but if that's what it takes to get me through the day, that's what I'm going to do.
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