They say an Englishman's home is his castle, but just tell that to this reviewer's neighbours, who churlishly denied planning permission to add a turret extension to the side of his house. It wasn't "in keeping" with the neighbourhood, apparently, and neither was the portcullis or roof-mounted vat of boiling oil. And so the Jehovah's Witnesses keep on coming... (just kidding - the exploding doormat took care of them eventually).

Luckily you can build castles to your heart's content in Stronghold Legends, as it's a real-time strategy game with the emphasis on defence and siege warfare. This is how the Stronghold series has always been, but Legends departs from its traditional historically authentic roots and branches into fantasy, laden as it is with Arthurian myth, Merlin flinging lightning bolts, soaring dragons and so forth.

Now that's not necessarily a bad thing, although purist fans may find the shift disconcerting, along with the fact that the game has simplified its castle management aspects somewhat and drifted more towards being a standard RTS.

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Still, that's tough ramparts for them if it's a good game; but the sad fact is, Legends falls short in a number of areas. For starters, it feels dated in terms of both the graphics and the interface. Okay, so Stronghold has never been about the visuals, and to be fair they're just about passable if rather uninspired and blocky.

What's less forgivable is the clunky interface, which is particularly weak when it comes to ordering your troops to attack. Right-clicking on the enemy to initiate combat is unnecessarily fiddly, and when your men do eventually charge you'll sometimes find that half of them are inexplicably milling about doing nothing rather than actually attacking.

The artificial intelligence routines seem pretty flaky all round, as enemy troops can easily be picked off piecemeal by a careful player, and at times they just seem to wander around aimlessly, or get stuck on the landscape (those old English oak trees are a bugger for snagging your chainmail tunic).

Stronghold is also lacking in the mission design department, in comparison to the sort of slick RTS experiences today's gamers are used to. The mission objectives are usually very simple and involve conquering or defending an area; there's the odd more interesting scenario, but they generally lack sophistication.

More positively, the castle management system is well designed, as it's simple and streamlined yet with nuances that are tricky to master. The game's storyline doesn't take itself too seriously, either, peppered as it is with refreshing doses of humour, and there's plenty of content here with three decently-sized campaigns, a skirmish challenge mode and online play boasting plenty of options.

That's all well and good, but whether you'll want to play any of these for longer than a few hours is debatable.

Between the dated graphics, flaky AI and finicky interface, Stronghold Legends doesn't have a great deal going for it. There are better RTS games that you could be spending your money on.