While Age of Empires 2 had already stoked my passion for medieval real-time strategy games when it launched in 1999, Stronghold arrived on PC in 2001 with a totally different feel.
Not only did you have to command troops and manage resources, but you also had to create crucial supply lines and production chains for food, arms, and resources.
Peasant happiness and taxation had to be carefully balanced based on several metrics. You could choose to take the lenient approach and watch your people laze about, or you could take the mean approach and watch everyone scurry around in fear.
To keep your work safe, you designed a castle with granular attention to detail, placing each small block of your walls and boosting them with towers, gatehouses, braziers, siege equipment, and more.
FireFly Studios, the gang behind Stronghold, didn't go away after the success of the first game. And thank goodness for that.
Stronghold Crusader, the sequel to Stronghold, launched in 2002, and it delivered a host of features that I didn't realize the original game was missing.
A new custom skirmish mode, where you could set up your own battles, was my new best friend. Now I could cheese games to my liking without having to follow set campaign rules.
Didn't feel like creating supply lines for infantry? I could build a mercenary camp, gouge my peasants for their gold, and pump out the paid soldiers.
While Stronghold — which also recently received a Definitive Edition upgrade — is a legendary game in its own right, Stronghold Crusader is what really sold me on the series.
Stronghold Crusader hasn't gone away since its launch
Having been released in 2002, you can imagine what the original Stronghold Crusader graphics look like. They're low-res, grainy, and not fit for modern displays.
These same graphics came to Stronghold Crusader Extreme in 2008, a re-release of Crusader that added new skirmish missions and some new mechanics.
Thankfully, the game received an "HD" upgrade in 2012, which currently sits at an Overwhelmingly Positive rating on Steam. The HD version upscaled the graphics, but kept the game in a similar state as its predecessor.
We've now arrived at Stronghold Crusader: Definitive Edition, which launched on July 16, 2025. I've only had a couple of nights to put in playtime, but I am floored by its quality.
The music ... the music! I can't turn my speakers up loud enough. All of the old sound effects are here, from the ropes singing at the stone mines to the creak of the windmill.
The overhauled graphics have so much more detail than before, making my towns a lot more vibrant. I love it when a remaster launches and looks exactly like how the original game appears in my memory — just like Diablo 2: Resurrected — and Crusader DE is in the same boat.
FireFly Studios didn't just upscale and redraw the graphics. Crusader DE arrives with new enemy lords, new military units, two new historical campaigns, a new co-op skirmish trail, bigger maps, and workshop support for user content.
The only downside I've noticed so far, and I'm not the only one, is multiplayer latency. Something is a bit wonky with the matchmaking, causing desyncs and delays.
I'm not too bothered by the multiplayer issues. I'm confident that FireFly will be able to come up with a fix in a patch, and in the meantime, I'm busy playing through all of the old and new campaigns and skirmishes.
There are thousands of hours of gameplay here, even before you jump into multiplayer. Don't like fighting? Plop down your keep on an empty map and build the castle of your dreams.
If you're a fan of detailed castle builders, historical campaigns, and real-time strategy mechanics, I can't recommend Stronghold Crusader: Definitive Edition enough.
You don't necessarily need a powerhouse gaming laptop or a fancy desktop gaming PC to run the game, either. The Steam page suggests a GPU with 2GB of VRAM and at least an Intel Core i3-6100 CPU.
Best part? You can pick it up for about $16 at CDKeys, which is a couple of dollars cheaper than Steam's listing.
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