Castles 2 (CD32 NTSC) - A Playguide and Review - by Lemon Amiga.com
42Castles 2: Siege and Conquest is a medieval strategy game, published by Interplay for the Amiga CD32 in 1993. During our campaign, we can build things, collect things, and wage war on our enemies, with a bit of spying thrown in. Lets check it out.
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Production Notes:
Captured: 14th Aug 2021
Narrated: 12th May 2022
Patreon Release: 18th June 2022
After playing and enjoying the Castles 1.1 game, I couldn't wait to try the sequel. I think it took a couple of days to finish the campaign, and I made regular save points so that I could load these up for a review, but more importantly, to get me out of any mistakes. At one point, the Pope gave the Kingdom away to on of my rivals, forcing me to go back and attack this guy before the award was made. This is shown in the video pretty much as it happened, including the bad ending. I had to look up a few tips online, and these gave away how to beat the game with diplomacy. So having stretched my realm down the map, I tried to use diplomacy on my rivals in order to beat the game. But Anjou was not willing to bargain, and each time I tried to raise the friendship level up to 2, they would attack on of their former castles, putting relations down to 1 again. It took a few attempts to trade and use diplomats at the same time, along with a few requests from Anjou for cash, before the relationship went up to 4, and they stopped attacking. This is not in the video, as I saved the game up at that point, and this is the save point I loaded up in the video just before the diplomacy end-game.
Unfortunately I didnt record this on a CD32 setup, in NTSC, but with my normal expanded AGA setup, and the CD32 WHDLoad install. I should have realised this was another NTSC game to add to the list. I then loaded up all the saves in sequence, and played each one for a while in the same way as I had done when playing through it. Anjou cut off my run through the map in the real game, and it was a constant battle to stop them from doing so. But perhaps the easy mode is a bit too easy apart from that.
When it came to editing this, I found that there were all kinds of audio issues, and I used software to filter those out, although it can make my voice sound bassier and more monotone. After fixing all of the audio bugs, there wasn't much time left to add loads of pop-ups and captions for this one. The game is mostly set in the reign of Edward II, so it should be easy to find more info on him. Once again, Youtube had an issue with the end credits, which made them freeze on the screen. Having rendered the video off again, it still freezes before the final fade out, but at least the credits are all there.
Danscore:
Castles 2 came out in 1993 as an AGA game, so I expected this to be a supreme improvement over the original. But although some bits are better, some bits are worse, and it didn't have the same atmosphere as the original game. The good bits are the spying, the trading, the economy, raids, patrols, and all of the different factions on a nice colourful map. The let-downs include less emphasis on castle building, rudimentary field battles, and no ability to siege a castle other than to attack it; meaning food stockpiles are redundant except to feed the army once in a while. I like the game, but there is something missing to make it a true classic, even compared to it's two predecessors. I think if the player had the ability to post their own garrisons inside castles, instead of letting the computer decide how many units we can have, then it would mean we could fortify that region and defend it. But with no defend options, the game feels like a stalemate of arms and monetary resources sometimes, where two armies can squabble over the same castle for years until it becomes a ruin, or the area becomes a diplomatic nightmare or a financially unrewarding sinkhole. I'd still give this 7 out of 10, as there are lots to do here, and the presentation is nice.