Citadels

Delivering a solid strategy game is perhaps the most challenging task for any developer of the genre. That’s why its outcome is the sweetest when the fans love it and keep playing it year after year. It has been while since strategy fans had an occasion to play a real time strategy featuring castle building at the medieval era. To answer all their longings, bitComposer Games recently launched ‘Citadels’ with the hopes to regain the attention. Regrettably, however, the game appears to be one of the biggest disappointments, most likely in the history of strategy gaming. Even with all the potential of its genre, Citadels still fails to deliver its promise in a very disappointing manner. Random crashes, sluggish control, spiritless gameplay and unlikable visuals leave nothing for the game to hold onto.

Citadels starts with an interesting story: The glory of King Arthur is long gone after his passing, and a vast army has assembled to take down everything he had built up to this point. Now, it’s your chance as the new King to secure and regain the glory, and to send the enemies back to where they came from. Unfortunately, the story immediately loses the appeal due to its manner of presentation. The text-based briefing feels uneventful and surely doesn’t motivate. The very first mission is a tutorial but; but its lackluster manner gives the game the worst possible start. Not only are the instructions unclear, navigating the map right away feels exhausting. To construct iron mines or quarries requires players need to identify the resources searching the map, while there are no indications of these resources in the mini-map. It’s an absolute luck-of-the-draw for anyone to be able to find the locations. While resources such as wood is easy to locate, others such as stone or iron are scarce.

After much struggle, when some of the buildings are constructed the economy takes its basic shape. As one of the key objectives is to construct an impenetrable fortress equipped it with soldiers, ditches and palisades, concentrating on the defenses becomes the first priority. Recruiting soldiers only requires the peasants to attend to the training ground and they all come outfitted. But the dilemma arrives when it comes to constructing defensive structures, especially walls. The map is filled with objects such as trees and rocks obstructing free building; forcing players to change the layout intended for construction. Most walls, however, are consisting of more than a few layers that require players to assign the peasants for the same task several times. The game doesn’t provide any signal if the peasants are standing idle for hours, while players need to keep an eye on every single one of them. Once the wall is built, adding defensive structures such as catapults and ballistics are easy to add to it, along with the gates. To have an upper hand during the sieges these structures are not only crucial but rather obligatory. But the difficulty follows as they require continuous mining of raw materials and production. It wouldn’t have been difficult at all, if finding the resources in the map weren’t this troublesome. Peasants simply stand still when ordered to collect stones because they can’t find them. I can hardly blame them when even I had trouble locating them on the map.

As expected, another key feature of the game, warfare, is as much tedious as constructing structures. Citadels introduces a whole new level of clumsy RTS, starting with selecting the units. It’s crucial for any strategy game to have a simple and easy way to select one unit or the entire army, a formula that had been worked out a decade ago by games like Age of Empires or StarCraft. In Citadels, however, selecting a unit is not only puzzling, but annoying too. It requires the player to click exactly at the bottom left, when a simple mouse drag for selection feels awkward due to its loading delay. While selecting the units is a dilemma, marching them to war becomes another. There are only two basic commands for units which are move and attack, but no formations that can give players a strategic advantage. When attacked, units colliding with the enemies exhibit a confusing scenario. Both units appear to be standing in one position hardly making any body movement, leaving players confused whether anything going down in there. By the time a player realizes that his units are taking too much damage and needs to retreat, it’s too late for that, as moving out from the battlefield is not any less awkward. If by any chance your units are fighting close to the wall that has a catapult built in it, it crushes your units too as having them to stop firing is another hassle.

Regrettably, Citadels fails in terms of presentation as well. The graphics aren’t all that bad as some of the building structures do look decent, but the overall appearance still provides an indistinct impression. It’s obvious that the developers wanted to provide an ancient feel but visuals appear rather fragmented. If the game looked half as the good as the screenshots provided by bitComposer Games earlier, the game would still appear decent. Adding to the dry visuals, dubious dialogue exchanges ruins the whole thing. It’s hardly understandable what the characters are saying as they sound garbled.

If it weren’t for all the flaws, idea-wise, Citadels could have made for a good game. It has the features strategy fans crave for. Players can experience both side of the war in two extensive campaigns. Perhaps the developers were trying to accomplish too much given the resources they had. It’s important for any strategy game to provide features that holds its players for longer hours and makes them keep coming back to it. Random crashes are not welcomed for any game especially not for strategy games when playing each scenario takes considerable amount of time. Poor combination of gameplay and presentation of Citadels is cursed with random crashes that take away whatever bit of significance left in it. bitComposer Games has promised to keep working on this title until all the issues are resolved. But the questions remain whether they’ll be able to resolve this much. With a price tag of $40 Citadels is a real injustice to the fans of this genre.

Sarwar Ron, NoobFeed @SarwarRon