With such options as Lord Marcus, who can recruit swordsmen and bowmen on the cheap, or Lord Hakim, who can turn enemy battalions into friends, you'll rarely bother with the others. Still, too many knights are burdened with nearly useless powers, such as entertaining settlers with singing and boosting the amount of cash that winds up on the collection plate after sermons in the cathedral. It's an interesting system that lends a fair bit of personality to how campaigns play out. You earn them as you progress through campaign missions and then get the chance to choose one of them as your main representative in upcoming assignments. There are a total of six knights in the game, each with unique names and abilities. The biggest addition is the knight, a hero unit of sorts that acts as the leader of your faction in missions. Blue Byte has tossed enough trees onto the tracks to keep missions from becoming too much of a grind (although you do pretty much rebuild the same city in every mission, so don't expect to completely dodge repetition). So there is never any need to fuss around with trade routes, no need to load and unload carts, or any of the other hip-deep busywork that frequently wrecks economic-style sims. Even trade dealings with friendly neighbors are a snap because loads are shipped out automatically by cart the moment that orders are given. From there, they are in turn dished out to the butcher shops, tanneries, weavers, dairies, candle makers, and so forth that keep your serfs happy, healthy, as well as fully clothed. The goods produced are then automatically collected by settlers and shipped off to your settlement's storehouse. These resources are denoted on the maps with icons, such as metal bars, rocks, and deer. Chopping wood, catching fish, mining stone or iron, gathering herbs, collecting honey from beehives, and the like is accomplished in Rise of an Empire by simply building the necessary huts in the immediate vicinity of the resources in question. The one big difference between the new and old formula is across-the-board simplification. Sound familiar? It should sound familiar because Blue Byte's been mining this vein since Bill Clinton was in the White House. Yet the art design showcases impressive medieval architecture, while the voice-acting is by turns serious and cheesy, which lets the game sit on the fence dividing gritty from cutesy. The landscape is cartoonlike and brightly colored, while characters boast watermelon-sized heads, as well as massive doll's eyes. All of this easygoing stuff is bolstered with a somewhat precious appearance. It's all pretty linear and predictable, although at least Blue Byte put enough thought into things to avoid the old "collect 20 food" or "collect 50 stone" objectives that make you want to put your head in an oven. You deliver clothing/food to towns in need, fight off Vikings marauding through coastal villages, light signal fires to open up trade routes, stage festivals to get your settlers hitched to comely wenches, and so on. However, they are so tightly developed and filled with busywork that you don't have time to miss battles. Quests are almost all about building and restoring-not fighting. This kinder, gentler vibe is furthered by a barely-there storyline about pacifying the wilderness to restore the once-great Darion Empire, presumably built in the last Settlers game, Heritage of Kings. Most of your efforts continue to be centered on developing a medieval city, which means you spend virtually all of your time constructing resource-gathering huts, erecting castle walls or gates, and trading with neighboring villages. As with previous Settlers games, the focus of the solo campaign is a mix of stereotypical city building with traditional Age of Empires-like resource gathering and soldier recruitment.
#THE SETTLERS GAME REVIEW SERIES#
The Settlers: Rise of an Empire is the most fulfilling game in the series, adding easy-to-play charisma to the usual Middle Ages economics and trimming much of the micromanagement that made playing past releases in the series as much fun as doing your homework.ĭespite the aggressive subtitle, gameplay here compares more closely to building an ant farm than it does to building a real-time strategy empire. But this second-rate status might be coming to an end with the latest addition to the line. Although German developer Blue Byte may have been topping the charts in Europe with these sedate simulations of medieval life for nearly 15 years now, the series has never gained the stateside prestige of something like Sim City or even Caesar. When you think of city-building game franchises, chances are pretty good that The Settlers isn't the first name that springs to mind.
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