With “The Settlers” a real video game classic was brought to life 30 years ago. Many sequels follow. “New Alliances” are intended to build on the success of the predecessors. ntv.de has tested whether the new edition can keep up with the charm of the old titles.
The farm produces grain, but harvesting it requires a scythe. The mill processes the grain into flour, from which the baker makes bread – but this requires water. Production chains like this were central to Ubisoft’s real-time strategy game The Settlers. With the continuation of the “The Settlers – New Alliances” series, the developers are slimming down properly in terms of resource diversity and production processes. The PC game should be an entertaining simulation for newcomers, but fans of the series are severely underchallenged. ntv.de tested the game.
The signs have been bad since the announcement in 2018. After the beta version last year, fans went on the barricades and criticized the streamlined model. The developers postponed the release by a whole year. The press test samples didn’t come until the release date either, which is never a good sign.
After all, the developers have taken the fans’ criticisms to heart and made the game a little more complex than in the beta. The original settler formula, which was already a success in 1993, still consists of building a working settlement in which various resources can be earned or traded in order to ultimately build a defense and recruit military units to take over the enemy’s camp.
Certain buildings and units require different resources, so pretty much everything needs to be built, from the aforementioned farm to the lumberjack to the coal mine. While in the previous titles food was urgently needed to “feed” certain branches of industry, in the new edition they only serve as a boost to speed up production. Strategically, there are simply resources that you rarely need, especially in the campaign.
The single player campaign mode is mediocre at best. The story in a nutshell: A people are driven from their homeland. Off to new shores and get to know the new island paradise. There are characters and cutscenes, but they can’t really carry the thin plot. Too much is done according to a formula. The same characters sit around the tactical table again and again, after intermediate successes there are short camera pans across the map. After all, the player gets to know new buildings, resources and new units step by step in 13 missions.
If you then want to compete with other settlers, you can try multiplayer. But it doesn’t work entirely without AI either, because bandit camps are distributed across the map so that a player cannot achieve a lightning victory with a surprise attack. Here the game loses a bit of dynamics.
The new “The Settlers” has a big problem: The real-time strategy and the building elements work, but are not consistent. As already mentioned, some resources are only optional, there are simply not enough units for sophisticated battles. The terrain of the maps doesn’t really matter either. Therefore, in battles simply decides the greater military clout.
Defensive structures such as turrets have a strong defense mechanism, but it is easy to trick it. You send a unit to trigger the continuous fire of the tower and wait with the rest of the army until the tower has shot itself empty, so to speak. Then it’s time to move forward. The battles are accordingly unspectacular and simple, but have a lot of bustle factor, which actually makes the series so charming.
But what is actually good about “The Settlers – New Alliances”? A lot of love has gone into the optics and level of detail of the animations. Watching the engineers constructing the buildings, the farmers in the fields or the hustle and bustle in the streets remains a fascinating aspect. The possible combinations of residential buildings always allow interesting structures to appear in the cityscape or village. Unfortunately, the aspect of creating a beautiful and well-functioning colony on an idyllic island is not decisive for the war or battle.
In addition, there were crashes in the test phase, i.e. the first three days after release, both in the campaign and in multiplayer. A first patch should have fixed that in the meantime.
Those who don’t know “The Settlers” series will be less upset about the differences to the previous games, but will find a nice real-time strategy game that knows how to entertain for a few hours. At the full price of 60 euros, however, it quickly becomes clear that the circumference is too thin overall.
