The Good
Easy to understand and a generous learning curve. A clean interface and well sorted and constructed menus. The over all playability is excelent and the replay value is extremly high. Extremly high quality graphics (for 1991) also add to an excelent gaming experience.

The Bad
The long waiting period especally after your castle is built until the end of the game. Also the erratic builing times (a very noticable difference bettween the lenth in days bettween building walls [100 days takes forever] and towers [100 days is like 10 minutes] with max workers, 90, for each) and the extremly buggy building...the people sometimes just stop building for no aparent reason and then start again. Castles also is much to involved with building only a few castles (fixed in Castles II where your rule is a little more internatonial) and it's to easy to be backed into a corner early on.

The Bottom Line
An excelent strategy game simmilar to Sim City, only less involved and complicated. Your mission is to build a castle and defend it from any invaders. The interface is excelent and although the game is pretty long and draged out, it's still involed and can be exciting. If you don't have a large military than you may find yourself defeated quite frequently.

You, as the king of Engaland, must also make important decisions about current (kind of, the game is set in the 1200's) events like if you want to forgive your brother or support your commanders in far away places. The game is quite unique and although compared to Sim City, the games are worlds apart. Sim City is a biz sim almost: you focus on money and land, crime and fires. Castles focuses on building a castle, managing battles abroad, and defending the castle from invaders by managing a military.

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