The Settlers
November 9, 2008
Blue Byte; 1993
I could simply review this by saying I got so engrossed in it that I ended up playing for 14 hours straight and going to bed at 9am, but that would be a copout. I will, however, apologise for the lack of screenshots as I forgot I was meant to be reviewing it and didn’t make any; I’ll add some later, but right now I want to meet my self-imposed deadline otherwise I’ll lose momentum!
Anyway, on with the game. Now normally, like puzzle games, I have little patience for real-time strategy games and would have spent as little time as possible with The Settlers. I find they’re generally an exercise in who can remember the most efficient way to amass a large army quickly, and my usual experience is by the time I’ve started laying out a carefully planned city and am just settling in for the long haul the enemy turns up with a bajillion soldiers who defeat the six peasants I’ve managed to amass and the whole thing is over. There’s no finesse, and I find the whole thing frustrating and pointless.
Settlers takes a totally different approach; no matter how fast you build, combat takes a while to get to and isn’t really the primary objective (and in fact in 14 hours of play I’ve only come close to combat, so I’ll revisit the review when it happens!) It’s all about building a self-sustaining community, and it happens at a slow enough pace that you can take your time planning without handicapping yourself in the arms race. In fact careful city design is essential rather than optional; not only do resources have to be gathered, they need to be processed and stored, and thoughtful placement of the buildings can make the difference between success and failure.
The key point to the development of your settlement is that unlike most RTSes your villagers can only travel by road, and pass they resources in a sort of human-chain from one point to another. A more traditional RTS like Age of Empires allows you to dump mines, farms, blacksmiths, etc., wherever you feel like it — as long as you can produce enough resources to build an army it’s irrelevant whether it makes any sense, and somehow resources magically move from place to place, so providing you produce a resource anyone can use it instantly anywhere else.
Technical details aside, the game looks and sounds great (although on lower end machines you sacrifice a few things) — birds tweet, pigs grunt, and as you [an around the map and different buildings come in to view you can hear their occupants at work. The characters themselves are small but well animated, and the buildings are similarly well-crafted. Even when the screen is full of buildings and townsfolk there’s no hint of slowdown, and the only real criticism I can find is that when building a road that passes behind buildings or through trees it’s often hard to tell where it’s going and a lot of trial and error is involved.
Anyway, my deadline approaches and I’ve got many more praises to sing for this game; my only wish is I’d played it sooner – I’ve only started to scratch the surface of the inner complexities of the game such as the ability to prioritise your transport network for different commodities, so I feel I should return to the review at a later date to fill in the blanks.
- Graphics: Cute, and manage to convey a good sense of what’s going on. Can become cluttered at times.
- Sound: Ambient sound cues let you know who’s on screen without looking, and even after 14 hours the medieval music is still bearable.
- Gameplay: Engrossing but slow-paced. Not one for adrenaline junkies, definitely.
- Amiga annoyances: Only supports one drive, but has minimal disk-swapping and is hard-disk installable (which I’d recommended doing).
Overall: It’s going to be hard to tear myself away to review something else, or indeed to do anything else!
