I may not have as much knowledge of The Settlers as many, but I remember touching on the various chapters over the years. While games like Age of Empires II: Age of Kings offered instant gratification through accessible yet strategic warfare, The Settlers excelled in giving you the primary purpose of settling? It was about anchoring, building a lasting existence through resource exploitation, strategic development and careful expansion. He was, in other words, a “city builder,” to put it mildly.
The Settlers: New Allies caught my eye immediately, but not because of the qualities described above. First and foremost, I wanted a real-time strategy game that would take a more direct approach to Warcraft III, while retaining the same focus on heroes, a limited number of units, and a smoother balance between base building and combat. Second, well, from the start it seemed that the Settlers fans had irked New Allies because it seemed to throw off all the core tenets of the series, and I had to see that for myself.
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Let’s be clear from the start that The Settlers: New Allies doesn’t feel like a settler game in that sense. At each level, you must build and maintain an army, defend your base with various defenses, and then start thinking more economically and long-term, considering the human needs required for long-term growth. It’s actually a lot more Warcraft than Settlers.
In general, the core gameplay of New Allies doesn’t focus on macro strategy, instead focusing on Age of Empires-style resource gathering and a fast-paced upgrade cycle. Iron, coal, wood and food must be collected from different workers while you build different defenses and find a strategic way to expand, defend, explore and finally defeat your enemy. You build troops, upgrade them, assemble them into formations on the battlefield – you’ve all done it before. It is simpler than its predecessors, but also more complex.
This setting is the same regardless of the selected mode. The game has a central campaign for one player of just over 12 hours, with cutscenes, characters and dialogue. It’s not like you really relate to the characters and the story gets boring pretty quickly, but it’s a nice and eclectic introduction to different mechanics, structure and strategy. In addition, you have several skirmish modes available that put you in simple duels against the AI or online. There are three different civilizations: Elari, Maru, and Jorn, but apart from offering slightly different units and aesthetic styles, they’re generally pretty similar.
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The truth is that everything looks very good. Every single map, viewed isometrically, offers big open spaces, great colors and pretty nice views too, and combined with pretty nice music, The Settlers: New Allies is a pretty eye-catching experience, despite some transitions, that’s rough in several scenes.
Trouble is, there’s not much difference, if any, in choosing between Elari, Maru, or Jorn, and it’s sad to see parts of the production cycle being subverted in favor of more unit-based tricks. I’m sure many die-hard fans will recognize this when they play New Allies, because before that you had to think about every step of the cycle. Bread required wheat and water, a mill and an oven. Meat required farms and farmers, feed and water for the animals, and a butcher. Everything is much simpler here, and while there are small hints here and there about converting certain resources into others, like processing raw wood into planks, everything is, well, simpler.
Simple isn’t always bad, and Ubisoft’s view that it’s time to bring in more new players isn’t an entirely far-fetched idea. The Civilization series and even The Sims have done this before, shedding pointlessly complex features in favor of a more streamlined design.
That doesn’t mean The Settlers: New Allies is easy, though. As of this writing, there’s only one difficulty level, and it’s pretty gruesome, especially not because you have to take back control of a certain piece of land by expanding your borders before you can build on it. It’s about sending engineers into the field, but you have to protect them or they’ll drop like flies in an instant. Set in relatively short streaks – a couple of campaign missions here, a skirmish there – The Settlers: New Allies has a fluidity that previous games couldn’t match, and it’s usually quite rewarding to build, watch your town thrive and continually do so Crucial makes adjustments that make you strong on the battlefield.
But in the end you always do the same thing. Something similar is happening with the Warcraft loop, solid as it is to date. There’s a core path, and you quickly learn how to build a loop that works, and then there doesn’t get much more versatility than that. Sure, there are heroes, and there can be a whole load of suspenseful situations in the fights themselves, but here, too, there is a lack of innovation.
In the battles themselves, I really missed the idea that each unit is useful in its own way and that it’s all about placing them, grouping them, and using their potential properly. It’s all about overwhelming numbers here and missing some crucial types, like artillery or siege engines or different types of infantry, to make you feel like you have the strategic advantage.
There’s nothing outright wrong with The Settlers: New Allies, and I won’t join the angry crowd that thinks this is some kind of sacrilege. At the same time, it’s true that some strategic depth has been sacrificed, and while the streamlining works well when it comes to building and optimizing your base, it doesn’t work that well on the battlefield.