Stronghold Crusader reminds me that building and maintaining castles isn't an easy process - thank you Stronghold Crusader for making that clear. But wait, didn't you show this to me six years ago? You know, back when this game was originally released. So why is it that I sit here today, ready to review a game that is six years behind every other RTS currently on the shelves? Presumably because this is Stronghold Crusader Extreme - precisely the same game you played back in 2002 with one new feature and a few new missions thrown in, which I'm afraid is about all that's been lavished on this re-release.

Everything that was good and bad about Stronghold Crusader remains intact, only some of it has aged terribly. It's curious why developers Firefly didn't do us all a favour and update those awful and incredibly dated graphics for a start. Never let it be said that I favour good looks over gameplay, but when a game looks this blocky I don't think it's unreasonable to demand that some effort be put into making it look a bit more like it was made this century. Things clip in and out of the scenery and the 2D sprites of the units look like a mass of coloured mush when they congregate; come on, abandoning the 3D graphics of the last two Stronghold games doesn't mean abandoning the effort to make this whole thing look a little modern. As it soon transpires though, the aged looks are the just the tip of the iceberg of features that needed to be addressed but where ignored completely.

The micromanaging of the castle remains, as does the tedium of appeasing to the peasant workforce and the collection of the resources actually needed to raise those walls. Yep, you've got to harvest tons of stone before you even get the chance to get to toy with designing your own castle - and just in case that wasn't enough, there's also the added difficulty of actually training up soldiers to defend your kingdom. This requires building a barracks, which only gives you access to soldiers once you've supplied them with weapons and armour you have to construct yourself, and you must ensure that there are enough peasants to actually train in the first place. The result is that the game becomes incredibly slow even without the threat of attack, but throughout the campaign you're constantly harassed by patrols of soldiers who'll slowly chip away at your infrastructure, killing off your workforce and destroying your buildings while you're stuck with trying to supply yourself with enough weapons.

When you do have the means to defend yourself, yet another outdated feature emerges. The combat never fails to disappoint by remaining as slow and as tedious as the building aspect of the game; for some reason knights and pikeman move at walking pace, which means that having them try and catch up to a group of enemies bearing down on your settlement results in a sort of reverse Benny Hill chase sequence.

It's at this point that I should mention Total War and how brilliantly it executes castle siege combat; this is important because the Total War games have always striven to go one better with every release, resulting in epic battles that few developers have been able to match. That kind of dedication to improving on a familiar formula was something that was much needed here.

By this point you're probably wondering why on earth Stronghold Crusader was re-released in its original form - and so am I. It looks old, most of its features have aged woefully; what is there to justify the purchase of a six-year-old game? We're left to assume that it's all on the shoulders of the added "Extreme" mode, which presents you with a series of skirmish games whose difficulty has been ramped up to, who'd have guessed, extreme levels. Whereas the main game can be far too slow, the extreme mode is quite the opposite, forcing you to react to the enemy and their ever increasing methods of destroying you almost immediately upon starting.

Using mercenary armies, you enemy and sometimes his allies mount up huge assaults that can crush you long before you realise what's happening. The game box boasts an increase in the amount of units from the one thousand of normal version to the ten thousand of Extreme, but while that might have impressed people way back in 2002, the sight of thousands of blocky pixels blending together in 2008 just makes the combat much more of a confusing mess than necessary. Not even the special abilities you can occasionally call upon add much fun to the proceedings, and nor do they help much, such is the speed of the enemy and his ability to mount offensives after heavy losses.

Quite who this aspect of the game is meant to appeal to is anyone's guess, but I'd assume that if you're not the type of gamer who is hooked to a drip full of jolt cola then you'd doubtfully be swayed to buying this re-release on the strength of the new game mode alone. This begs the question then, why buy a game this dated with so little in the way of progression to offer its own franchise, let alone the strategy genre at large? The answer is simple: there is no reason. Beyond the fact that this is the only castle simulator around at the moment, there is absolutely nothing that Stronghold Crusader Extreme can offer that justifies an inflated price for a very old game.

Stronghold has always been a series that was pleasingly enjoyable to play and has always had bags of potential, but this recent rehash does nothing other than highlight just how out of date it has become. It's a passable game at best, but for your money you'd be better off with Total War if all you're looking for is a decent castle siege simulator.

Reviewed by Kieron Giacopazzi for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).