Witt Interactive Software is working on bringing Castle Strike to North American retail later this year, and recently we had the opportunity to try the game at length to get an idea of what this game will bring to the already crowded RTS genre on the PC. What we found was a promising game that focuses heavily on the art of castle siege in a medieval European setting. The game is focuses on massive battles, castle sieges and other similar good stuff, along with the usual sorts of resource gathering and empire building associated with real-time strategy games. In the game players can take on the role of an army leader during the Hundred Years War period - taking control of the English, French or Germans.

One of the key elements of the game is building and upgrading your castle. Players start out with a zone where they can build a mighty castle and all the amenities you'll need to wage a major war while defending your home turf. In this zone players can decide where to place defensive structures, community buildings and military structures. Placing your defensive structures in the right place is important for defending you castle. Some key elements of building your empire streamlined to make things easier like building walls one piece at a time like in most RTS titles.

But beyond just building, Castle Strike does a good job of adding management elements while allowing players to focus on what they are poised to do eventually - conquer. Players will find the auto management system for their kingdoms work great freeing up would be conquerors and kings by taking the hassle out of micromanaging your citizens and workers. The game also does a great job of balancing civic and military in a way that each relies on the other to prosper to their fullest potential.

But, as we mentioned earlier Castile Strike puts a keen focus on castle siege warfare, as the name fully implies. Unlike other strategy games where siege warfare is a light affair limited to only a handful of methods for breaching great walled kingdoms, Castle Strike gives players a myriad of tools and methodologies to crack the nut. Players can utilize a variety of traditional siege warfare units like catapults, trebuchets and medieval cannons and different types of infiltration like tunnel, explosives, ladders, siege towers, and more. Castles are also a lot harder to break into in this game than in traditional games and lots of defensive structures, units and methods are in place to repel these types of attacks. And for armies, players can tap into ranks of swordsmen, pikemen, archers, axemen, knights and more as they attempt to break through the walls and conquer their opposition.

Another interesting aspect of Castle Strike is that siege engines require drivers, and just about any unit can serve as an operator most require two or more participants to operate, and are intricately animated to look and function like the devices used during the time period the game is set in. The game also features heroes, which aren't quite as powerful as they are in other games, but do provide leadership bonuses and the ability to create special formations called banners - which offer different statistical bonuses to attacks defense and hit points.

The game offers three major single player campaigns, as well as a robust multiplayer component that should keep RTS fans busy enough. Witt Interactive Software's games tend to sell at a decent price point so Castle Strike will probably offer a decent value at a moderately decent price.



Finally we should mention that Castle Strike is fully 3D, and offers some pretty decent eye candy without requiring a high end system to run. Our run with the game on a fairly new NVIDIA board ran without a hitch and looked great. The siege engines were particularly well done and various effects, animations and backgrounds looked pretty darned good considering that the recommended specs are a Pentium III 1.0 GHz.

Though we only had a limited amount of play time with Castle Strike, what we played we found enjoyable and interesting. Whether or not the title breaks any new ground remains to be seen but we can honestly say that the experience was totally solid and fun. The game does need a slight polish in some areas of the story in terms of its transition from a European game to a North American affair, but that's a minor thing. Look for the game to hit North America in October. For more information check out the game's official North American web site . A playable demo is also available at the link above.