14 DAY TRIAL // 
On paper Citadels sounds pretty good, a mix between Age of Empire, the seminal real-time strategy experience set in Medieval times, and Stronghold, the series that focused more on building castles and fortifications than on actual battles fought over them.
Unfortunately, it does not take too long to find out that the reality of Citadels is that of an unimaginative title that seems to have missed all the last 10 years of evolution in its genre and also failed to discover one single hook that can capture the player’s attention in the long term.
The story is loosely based on the universe of King Arthur and his Camelot and the game tries to play around with two different time frames.
But there's no clear reason to care about all the peasants that are running around and their struggle and none of the units in the game has the personality required to keep the player engaged in the long term.
Unfortunately, apart from a few stylistic nods to King Arthur's legend, this could have been a story about any Medieval king or any other fantasy character as it does little to bring the player into the world and immerse him.
This could have been forgiven had the core gameplay mechanics been interesting, but they fail to evolve the traditional Age of Empire and Stronghold concepts in any way and they are littered with weird oversights.
The player needs to use citizens created by his village center in order to make buildings, house population, gather resources, create a variety of units and then assault the enemy and defeat him.
There are tiers to the resource buildings and to the units that can be made and a fully upgraded force of soldiers will perform better than simple swordsmen and archers.
But I had little chance to create the advanced soldiers as I initially was unable to find where I could place two of my resource buildings.
In Age of Empires, gold was glowing on the map and stone was suitably dark against the clear green of the grass.
The more muted colors used in Citadels make it hard to see resources and, even worse, the game does not limit building placement, which means I can build resource centers anywhere only to find that my peasants are unable to use it.
A successful strategy also involves the creation of walls and towers, which need to be placed at strategic junctions on the maps.
The system is intuitive, but there’s no variety to the fortifications and there are often elements of the world that need to be avoided.
Once a wall and tower have been made, it’s not hard to place an entrance and then put archers on top in order to stop enemy assaults.
Unfortunately, the combat is very limited, with no actual place for tactics.
The best idea is to let the enemy attack fruitlessly, while you put together your own solid force and then attack, making a beeline to the enemy town center without bothering to take out any other buildings he might have.
The graphics of Citadels are also solidly under par and they do not even manage to reach the quality of something like Age of Empire III, a game that Ensemble launched in 2005.
The music and sound design is also uninspired and do nothing to enhance the atmosphere or keep the player interested.
Citadels is an example of how not to create a modern video game and some gamers might play it just to see how good other games are.
If developers lack resources, they should have a clear idea, preferably innovative, based on which to create their game.
Without that, an interesting location or story should exist to keep the player focused and playing.
If neither is present, then maybe the game should not be created in the first place.
NOTE: I played the launch version of the game and since then the team has launched a major update that streamlines Citadels and makes it more playable.
