Stronghold 2: Steam Edition
Worth it · Strategy · 2017
Steam Deck UnsupportedThe verdict
BUY IT.
Worth it at $14.99.
- Length
- 16.9h
- Value
- $0.89/hr
- Reviews
- 89% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 512 MB of memory, 256 MB Video Card, 3 GB of storage. Windows only.
Tax, torture or treat your peasants! Rehabilitate criminals or sentence them to death? Decide as you enjoy jousting over a lavish banquet, all while under siege from the warmongering Lord Barclay.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
The lowest price on record is $3.74, set in October 2021. It has been discounted 87 times in the 9 years tracked here, typically at 70 percent off, with about 5 weeks between sales. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 4 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 5 weeks.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 1 percent on value. It is pricier than 84 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 93 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Stronghold Crusader HD (2012) ($9.99, scores 97) beats it on value, while it beats Stronghold Legends: Steam Edition ($14.99, scores 52).
2 of the 697 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written March 2020 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 60 percent of the 275 reviews written there were positive, against 89 percent overall, and those are 6 percent of everything written about it.
The main story runs 16.9 hours. Doing everything runs 39, 2.3 times as long.
The drop-off
57% start to <1% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
128 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
Stronghold 3 and 4 should have been made like this game... 3 is horrible and 4 looks to be the same... So many years later Stronghold 2 looks still better than all these new games.
I built them houses. I gave them food. I gave them jobs, ale, religion, entertainment, and a beautiful castle to live beside. I kept the granary full, the taxes reasonable, and the enemies outside the walls. One rat appears, someone misses a meal, and suddenly I'm the worst lord England has ever seen. The peasants are miserable, the crime rate is rising, and apparently the entire kingdom is now my fault. 10/10 game...
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: critic score (Metacritic).
Cite this score
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Stronghold 2: Steam Edition scores 77/100 on the BANG Score (worth it). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/40960/stronghold-2-steam-editionThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 15, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.